Business & Economy

Tens of millions of people are out of work because of the coronavirus pandemic, but Amazon says it's willing to keep 125,000 people it hired to deal with the online shopping spike as permanent workers.

The company hired 175,000 temporary workers as people stuck at home because of the pandemic switched to shopping online. Now Amazon says it's offering most of those workers permanent full-time jobs.

Updated at 9:38 a.m. ET

More than 1 in 4 U.S. workers have lost their jobs since the coronavirus crisis shut down much of the economy in March.

Just last week, another 2.1 million people filed for unemployment benefits, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's down 323,000 from the previous week but brings the total for the past 10 weeks to 40.8 million, which represents 26% of the civilian labor force in April.

When the federal small business rescue program was announced, Krista Kern-Desjarlais scrambled to research it, talking to her banker and digging online.

Kern-Desjarlais runs two restaurants in Maine — the Purple House in North Yarmouth and Bresca & the Honeybee, a summer-only food stand on Sabbathday Lake. She decided to hold off on that coronavirus rescue effort, called the Paycheck Protection Program or PPP.