Amazon Wants To Retrain Its Employees, As A Part of “Upskilling 2025” Initiative

Last week Amazon announced that they are planning to spend $700 million to retrain 100,000 employees of the company. The company’s U.S. workforce about 33% of its employees a will be trained again as a part of its “Upskilling 2025” initiative.

Amazon says in its announcement, “The American workforce is changing, and there’s a greater need for technical skills in the workplace than ever before.”

The idea of upskilling has been already adopted among companies like AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, and Accenture, per Gizmodo.

The state’s largest private-sector labor union, United Food and Commercial Workers, look towards this initiative of the company as a whitewash through which it can terminate employees from the job.

UFCW President Marc Perrone said in a statement, “Jeff Bezos’s vision is clear—he wants to automate every good job out of existence, regardless of whether it’s at Whole Foods, Amazon warehouses, or competing for retail and grocery stores.”

Some Government job-retraining programs had failed in the past.

Older employees are unwilling to re-enter in the classroom environment as they feel its uncertain whether jobs will be there after retraining. Usually, employers make retraining intentional after-hours and don’t pay employees to undertake it.

And afterward, representatives face the difficulties of entering a fresh out of the box new field—and of being inexperienced in it.