As COVID-19 vaccines become available to front-line workers, we are asking our employees to be vaccinated at the earliest appropriate time to protect themselves, their families, and communities. To help, hourly employees in the U.S. such as those working in Operations, Customer Service, AWS Support and Data Centers, Devices Support and Data Associates, Whole Foods Markets, and Physical Stores will receive $40 for each dose if they have to go off-site for the vaccine.
In addition to supporting employees when they go off-site to get the vaccine, we have begun the work to build on-site vaccine options at many of our Operations sites and will use them in partnership with local governments as the vaccine becomes available to us.
This new benefit is on top of the $2.5 billion we invested in special bonuses and incentives for our teams globally over the last year, and the $11.5 billion we invested in COVID-19-related measures overall. This investment has enabled us to provide more than one million in-house COVID-19 tests for employees, a pop-up clinic in Seattle, PPE and extensive safety measures for employees and partners throughout our network, a $25 million relief fund for partners, and two million testing kits to teachers, staff, and select students in Colorado, to name a few.
We’re also proud to have created more than 400,000 good jobs since the COVID-19 crisis began, and we stand ready to help President Biden and state governors with logistics related to vaccine distribution. We’ll continue investing and offering our capabilities to help protect our employees and communities around the world.
