Amazon Pauses ‘Pay to Quit’ Offers for Warehouse Workers

Faced with an increasingly tight labor market, Amazon has quietly paused a longstanding program through which it paid warehouse workers up to $5,000 to quit their jobs after the busy peak season, The Information has learned.

Amazon instituted the program—known inside the company as Pay to Quit or simply The Offer—in 2014 to help the company quickly trim the size of its workforce, which expands significantly during the holiday season to keep up with a flood of online shopping. Amazon has offered the one-time payments once a year to warehouse workers and other full- and part-time hourly employees who agree to leave their jobs and never work for Amazon again. While paying employees to leave may seem counterintuitive, the internet retailer viewed it as a way to ease out workers who weren’t happy at the company.