Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: When Amazon.com Inc. disclosed its workers’ median annual salary of $28,446 last week, the predominantly blue-collar nature of its workforce became clear. 
  
 The figure puts Amazon on par with chocolate manufacturer Hershey Co., slightly above retailer Home Depot Inc.—and miles below the $240,430 median annual compensation at Facebook, according to the companies’ latest proxy statements. 
  
 Amazon... ||||| Shira Ovide is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She previously was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Read more opinion LISTEN TO ARTICLE 3:34 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email 
  
 The big numerical reveal on Wednesday was Amazon.com Inc. finally spilling the beans on the number of Prime members (more than 100 million). It also disclosed another number that shows how much it relies on an army of people moving physical merchandise around the world: $28,446. 
  
 That's the median annual compensation of Amazon employees. Amazon reported this number for the first time under a new requirement that companies disclose the gap between pay for the rank-and-file and the person in the corner office. (Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, reported total compensation of $1.68 million last year. As in prior years, he didn't take a stock bonus, collected a salary of $81,840 and had $1.6 million in personal security costs that Amazon covered.) 
  
 That median pay figure is skewed by the large number of Amazon's more than 560,000 employees who work in its package warehouses, distribution centers, Whole Foods grocery stores and other places far from the ping-pong tables, endless free kale chips and yoga rooms of Silicon Valley's rich tech campuses. Compare Amazon's median pay with Facebook Inc.'s $240,430. 
  
 Pay Check Amazon disclosed that its median worker compensation is $28,446, complying with a new law that requires companies to disclose the figure Sources: the companies' proxy filings 
  
 Just a reminder that this means half of Amazon's workers make more than $28,446, and half make less. The company doesn't have to disclose average pay, which would probably be skewed higher by the smaller number of Amazon's highly paid tech workers. In a statement, Amazon said its median pay figure includes people in more than 50 countries and part-time employees. The company also said it offers "highly competitive wage and benefits." (Full disclosure: I have a family member who works for a labor organization that advocates for higher worker pay.) 
  
 Amazon likes to boast about its prowess in job creation, and the company's workforce has exploded in recent years. Amazon is now the second-largest private employer in the U.S. behind Walmart Inc. In Bezos's annual letter to shareholders, also released on Wednesday, he again highlighted Amazon's investment in infrastructure and its ability to create jobs both directly and indirectly. 
  
 You're Hired Amazon's workforce is nearly four times the size it was three years ago, in part because the company absorbed about 89,000 employees from Whole Foods Source: Amazon 
  
 Bezos said Amazon directly created more than 130,000 jobs in 2017, not including people the company absorbed from acquired companies such as Whole Foods. That means Amazon brought on board more people in one year than the entire workforce of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., which said it had more than 80,000 employees at the end of last year. 
  
 "Our new jobs cover a wide range of professions, from artificial intelligence scientists to packaging specialists to fulfillment center associates," Bezos wrote. The company's median compensation figure, however, shows that at least by volume, Amazon's workforce tilts more toward the fulfillment center associates than AI specialists. 
  
 There's long been a debate about the quality of jobs at Amazon and whether cities and states should roll out the red carpet for Amazon to open package warehouses in their backyards. 
  
 Amazon's median pay works out to about $14 an hour, assuming a full-time worker at 52 weeks a year. That's a solid wage in many parts of the U.S. and not so much in other parts. For comparison, Target Corp. recently announced plans to pay at least $15 an hour by the end of 2020. Those people questioning the quality of Amazon's jobs just got a new data point for their critiques. 
  
 A version of this column originally appeared in Bloomberg's Fully Charged technology newsletter. You can sign up here. 
  
 ( Adds Amazon statement in the fourth paragraph. ) |||||
Student:
Amazon is an odd company—it's "often compared to Silicon Valley tech giants," as the Wall Street Journal puts it, but tech is just one part of its business. Retail, logistics, and transportation are the other parts, and that explains why the median annual salary of its workers is just $28,446. Its half-a-million-strong workforce is largely blue-collar, with most of its employees working in warehouses and making about the same as workers in the warehouses of other companies—despite the fact that Amazon has, as one economist puts it, an "enormous market advantage"; its market valuation is 184 times this year's estimated earnings. Amazon, along with more than 330 other companies, just released its median annual pay amount as part of the Dodd-Frank Law's requirement to reveal the gap between worker pay and executive pay, Bloomberg reports; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reported total compensation of $1.68 million last year. When comparing Amazon's median pay to other tech companies, it comes in quite low: Facebook's median annual compensation, for example, is $240,430. But Amazon has the fifth-highest median pay of retailers that are ranked by S&P Global; retailers including Home Depot, Macy's, Walmart, and Gap all have lower median compensation figures. Amazon pays less than all the transportation companies ranked by S&P Global, and when it comes to logistics, an expert estimates its pay comes in in the top half of logistics employers but not in the top 10%. The median annual figure takes into account all of Amazon's employees, both full- and part-time, who are located in more than 50 countries. (Amazon's workforce now also includes Whole Foods grocery store employees.) An Amazon spokesperson says full-time US fulfillment-center workers make an average wage of more than $15 per hour, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses.