Retail and tech giant says its open roles pay an average of $17 an hour, an increase over the company’s typical starting wage of $15 an hour

Amazon.com Inc. is hiring 75,000 workers and offering $1,000 signing bonuses in some locations, the latest hiring spree in what has been a year of tremendous growth.

The retail and tech giant said its open roles are offering average pay of $17 an hour, an increase over the company’s typical starting wage of $15 an hour.

The company in April said it was raising wages for more than 500,000 hourly employees of between 50 cents and $3 an hour, an investment of more than $1 billion. Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky has said that competition for employees will rise.

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“The economy is starting to open up, and there is a lot of need for new employees for a lot of different industries,” he said last month.

Amazon said Thursday the new jobs are its warehousing network across the U.S. It said some areas with the most open positions include California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington and Michigan.

The retailer’s hiring comes after a year in which it added more than 500,000 workers across the world. The company employs about 950,000 people in the U.S., most at its hundreds of warehouses throughout the country. Its total workforce recently decreased by about 2% after the holiday shopping season, a period in which it adds workers to meet an increase in demand. Read more at WSJ