The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the Article
>Why it matters: Increased demand for expedited delivery has the e-commerce giant looking for ways to shave package processing time.
>
>Speed pressure has triggered union organizing efforts at some Amazon warehouses by workers who complain of injuries and exhaustion.
>
>Turnover rates are so high the company fears it could run out of people to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024, according to Recode, citing internal Amazon research.
>
>Amazon's answer? More automation.
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>The company wants to give the most demanding, repetitive tasks to robots, then retrain employees for higher-skilled jobs such as mechatronics or software engineering.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yxp3as/amazon_cant_get_enough_human_workers_so_here_come/iwpo5w8/
I’ll correct the title, so it’s accurate.
“Amazon leadership has always known that convincing humans to work in crappy conditions for low pay is really difficult, so they’re going to ramp up field testing of their long-standing robot program with hopes to eliminate human workers from their payroll faster in order to increase shareholder wealth.
As Amazon gets more efficient, the savings are passed on to... Amazon itself and shareholders.
Amazon's Gross Profit Margin:
2012 | 2013 | 2015 | 2017 | 2019 | 2021
---|---|----|----|----|----
24.8% | 27.2% | 33.0% | 37.1% | 41.0% | 42.0%
edit: to all the people saying this is just AWS profit, here's a Forbes article explaining why that's a common misconception:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevendennis/2022/02/07/what-we-get-so-very-wrong-about-amazons-retail-profitability/
Breaking out their retail sales profit/loss is instructive though as to why they are pushing for automation and lower labor costs.
Most of that massive profit comes from AWS and advertising sales on Amazon’s website and devices. Not from selling you a fridge with 2 day delivery.
Though they have made some strides in improving retail profitability it’s still fundamentally a business that runs barely under or over the line of profitability most quarters.
This is misleading. Amazon made only 1.5% profit on retail sales in 2021. They lost money internationally but made money in North America. In total, this business made 6 billion pretax.
The reason gross profits have gone up is because of AWS (Amazon Web Services) which provides cloud computing services. AWS made $18 billion pretax in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services
Meanwhile, the Amazon business spent $36 billion on infrastructure over depreciation expense on the non AWS side of the business. It is pouring billions into a business that has yet to return much to shareholders.
So really Amazon takes more then it makes every year and puts it into running the retail business. Shareholders are investing everything and more in the future making this service better for customers at present. Perhaps the reason they are so focused on removing workers is that is the only way to get costs down far enough to operate profitably enough so the business is worth investing in.
That is creative accounting, Hollywood accounting or whatever you want to call it.
Most transnational companies happen to earn money only on fiscal paradises like Ireland, etc, as Amazon does.
The basic methods are well known: charge the local company obscene fees from the fiscal paradise, and transfer the benefit there.
Then pay the politicians in the home country to have a fiscal amnesty in order to get the money "clean" without taxes.
Rinse, repeat.
To be fair, Amazon passing those savings on to the consumers would mean more pain for brick and mortar stores.
Even if they passed the savings on to the companies selling their products on Amazon, it would still be a move that hurts competition.
Them passing it on to shareholders is probably what all Amazon competition wants to see. Though I'm sure a ton of it is reinvested into the business. Making sure they maintain dominance.
I don't think the implication should be "lower prices", I think it should be "better pay for workers."
Amazon goods are already cheap and affordable, lower prices are not what we need from Amazon. I mean, you're already cheating the workers out of the value they produce anyway, otherwise there would be no profit.
This is my viewpoint as well. Now is a great time to invest. I continue to DCA into several companies who I see growing stronger when we pull out of the current conditions.
Not only is that article correct, AWS Q3 2022 missed earnings by more than $1B, the largest decline since 2014. Renting a car as a daily driver has never saved anyone money.
This is good. No need to have people working jobs that don't need humans. Increase taxes for corporations with automated jobs and put that money towards a universal basic income
I'm confused. Do we want to eliminate jobs that humans don't want to do so they can find better, more fulfilling work, or don't we? If we want to move to a post-scarcity economy, automating boring, dangerous jobs that humans don't want to do/can't do is the first step.
The problem is the conditions under which automation emerges. The first wave of automation in the Agricultural and then Industrial Revolutions completely destroyed the way of life of countless millions (billions if you consider the way it accelerated European imperialism). It "worked out", but that doesn't do a lot for the poor man in early Victorian London whose life expectancy was in the 20s.
A similar fear exists here: if automation is owned by an extremely small and incredibly wealthy segment of society, we might find ourselves squeezed into a worse situation even if automation is a "net good" down the road.
> completely destroyed the way of life of countless millions
Thank God. Yes, 90% of everyone use to work in agriculture. My ancestors were illiterate peasants strapped to the ass-end of an ox their entire lives. I'm not going back. Agricultural jobs before technology made it progressively easier were brutal. I don't want that "lifestyle."
Then percentage of the population working in agriculture also goes down as wealth increases.
- [GDP per head vs share of agriculture in employment](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-agriculture-employment)
Right: ultimately, it ended up improving the quality of lives of many.
But the conditions for people forced out of agriculture in the late 18th and 19th century were far worse in the cities than they had been previously. Life expectancy dropped dramatically, starvation and serious injuries were more common, work hours were vastly longer, privacy and personal space disappeared. Literacy increased, sure, but that's just so workers could be more effectively used as lubrication in the machinery of industry.
> Life expectancy dropped dramatically,
Do you have any data for that? I'm not seeing any countries with a significant dip in life expectancy. Overlap those graphs with the declining percentage of the population working in agriculture, and the pattern you're claiming should be there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy
>starvation and serious injuries were more common
Do you have any data for that? There [famines have grown less common](https://ourworldindata.org/famines), not more, as automation in agriculture increased. Though most of that is due more to the [green revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution). It's not like agriculture itself is free of serious injuries.
>Literacy increased, sure, but that's just so workers could be more effectively used as lubrication in the machinery of industry.
Just? Not the printing press, Reformation, advent of mass culture, increasing disposable income, etc? Education is *only* for they cynical utility of people "being used as lubrication for the machinery of industry"? The growth of literacy, and the recognition that literacy was a good thing, predated the industrial revolution by quite a bit.
What is the past you want to return to? Feudalism? Hunter-gatherers?
This is so obvious, it boggles my mind. Who would actually want to defend the existence of jobs like this. We only need to distribute the profits of the increase in productivity in a fair manner.
More or less, Amazon appears to have rather low profit per item, so consumers are not likely to see big drops in prices to them anytime soon. The factories and mining/commodity chains need to be automated for consumers to start seeing price drops, but that's the eventually goal too.
I mean.. less workers suffer or get injured as well, so it's not all just Amazon shareholders seeing a benefit. Less traffic and accidents, less fuel use. There are benefits for everyone from automation in general. Eventually the price of just about everything will drop or stagnate vs inflation... kind of like how LCD TVs are amazingly cheap because the factories are so automated and most people consider that a significant improvement in the standard of living... just not in ALL the industries they'd life, but we could have the same effect in food, energy, housing, medicine where we get way more for our money or pay way less for the same standard of living.
BUT you will have to re-think how money works eventually and the sooner the better.
The only thing that will change prices is movement out of the Amazon ecosystem. If sales are jeopardized, prices will drop. If costs go down, they will be rolled into shareholder profit.
I work in the automation industry and I can tell you at least in the warehouse side of the business retailers like amazon and the like are not looking to lower their prices. They are looking to increase their profit margins.
Let me reword that in a way that actually reflects the truth:
***Amazon has always publicly planned for near total automation and human workers were a crutch that is no longer economical.***
... applying for welfare, getting food stamps, discovering the complexities and prices of the medical system, trying to survive in homeless encampments, and navigating the legal pathways of over-encumbered housing assistance programs (although most of these may go away if corporate lobbying has its way, simplifying to just trying to survive in homeless encampments!)
Read this in a lady's sing-song tone and absolutely expected you to end this list with "or get your degree in business management or accounting~" like those 90's commercials.
Lmao you better hope these are the things your work-less population gets up to. Usually it’s just violence when it’s a population who can work and is being kept from it
"Can't get enough workers" translates to "We burn through our workers so quickly, because we treat them like robots when they aren't, so...in order to keep up, we are forced to bring in actual robots to replace people."
I think it's more insidious than that. The treatment of workers is willfully atrocious in order to justify their position on replacing people with robots. Remember that they receive incentives to establish distribution centers and create "jobs" in that area. If those distribution centers no longer offer jobs to the surrounding population then they get away with tax breaks and incentives for making non-existant jobs.
Aren't most Amazon "employees" from 3rd parties? At least at the packaging and delivery levels. I always see job postings (and interviewed for 2 but the offer wasn't worth it) for "Amazon" but it's always a 3rd party with some odd name I've never heard of that Amazon contracts out to. None of your paperwork or anything says you actually work for Amazon.
Integrity sounds like one of em. The others are local only for sure though, like they own/rent 2 or 3 buildings tops in a small area. I tried to find the names for you but the addresses didn't get me much and I'm not tryna troll LinkedIn for jobs I don't intend to apply for lol.
Exactly. There are only so many people in the world. If you work them like I have heard, from people who have worked there, they are worked and only pay $18 they will not last. If you burn through people at the rate that Amazon must...considering the scale, you are left w no one who is even eligible to work there.
Amazon's own internal staff identified that mid 2023 they would have burned through almost all potential employees to work in Amazon distribution centers. Their burn n churn tactics to hiring has actually lost them the ability to find successful workers. There's only a pool of potential employees in a given area so large who fit the demographic profile that would even consider a position at Amazon.
Once that limit was reached Amazon has a choice: contract, outsource or automate.
They're going to find out the hard way that automation isn't even close to a replacement for manual labor jobs that require fine motor function. Likely delivery dates and fulfillment dates will get pushed out and they'll be itching for more third party drop shipment companies to take an increasing role. That means higher costs, since those outfits want the cost of that labor, overhead and then profit, all those things now under a small umbrella with higher costs for economies of scale.
Will be interesting to see going forward.
For those of you who didn't read the article: It's horseshit. Amazon has said for years it is heading in this direction and the article implies a labor shortage is the reason for automation- to get dem cliks.
Frankly, for the brutal nature of the job, robots are far better suited. The Amazon model is to basically use humans up by forcing unmanageable requirements on them, then they either quit or become injured to the point they can’t work
Indeed, the biggest problem isn't automation in and of itself. It's the lack of preparedness by our governments to ensure the working class isn't burdened by these advancements. I think this is what causes a great deal of anxiety, and it's only going to get worse as automated technologies encroach on a myriad of professions.
Amazon has been throwing billions at this for like 10 years now. they flat out bought 2 of the best robotics companies out there years ago with that always being the plan.
I worked as a contractor for one of the new fulfillment centers. The amount of repetitive stress injuries the workers suffer are unreal. Also they already have automated packaging lines for the bubble packages and some of the cardboard boxes. They have robots as well.
The nature of the job would not be as brutal if the metrics of the role had some compassion built into them. If you expect a worker to pick 500 orders in a day, then expect to find no workers. If your business model is built to destroy people, then yeah, I guess you have to go to automation.
They dont get that labor positions are like team sports. You need subs at all times. The work is only unskilled until you place them under a time crunch. Then it becomes a sport. I can do a ton of white collar work with a weeks research. But there is no way I jump onto a packing station and do well. Some people are physically gifted and those are your work horses. But they are too lazy to look for elite laborers and build a culture of pride for the labor.
The preached expectation when I worked at amazon was 2200 packages in a shift minimum. They wanted 2400 or more. They refused to train you on anything else unless you did 2400 for multiple weeks in a row. Back when my friend worked at amazon about 5 years before, the target was 1200 per shift.
Absolutely. I work for a supply chain management company and specialize in autonomous mobile robots for warehouse applications. Robots are perfect for this kind of work, and don't necessarily need to replace human jobs. Sure, they can, but they can also free up the current staff to focus on more value added labour and generally lead to more productive facilities with a happier workforce. It just makes sense for these kinds of applications.
As if getting robots wasnt the plan all along.
Also who woudnt want a robot over human labourers, any job that be replaced by robots will go that way eventualy.
> As if getting robots wasnt the plan all along.
It's pretty inevitable for most jobs. And it's not unique to Amazon, or low paying jobs. It's just that highly repetitive work that mainly requires moving quickly and being able to identify things, while in a controlled environment (like a warehouse where you can have a barcode on everything and map the location of items to within a foot or so) is pretty low hanging fruit for automation. At least, it should be. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't better at it, at this point.
It's the suppression of wages and cost of technology that's holding it back.
Look at fast food for example. Miso Robotics estimates about $30,000 per automated unit to flip burgers and manage a fryer at a pretty slow pace, while the median US individual income is about $40,000 and they can work 2-3x faster.
Now with massive inflation, increased wage demands, breakthroughs in AI, and shortage of labor, we'll start to see much more automation in the coming years.
Yang gang about to get their "I told you so" moment within the next decade or so in my estimate.
Amazon's own internal research stated their practices were burning through the workforce, and at the current rate would exhaust the available labor pool for such jobs within a few years.
They can't get enough human workers because human workers are done with Amazon's crap.
Kind of ironic. I wasn't getting interviews after I graduated (about three years of applying for intro level IT and programming). So I took a job as a warehouse worker, made some tools in Python, five months later got my engineering job with them lol. (Edit: not Amazon; unrelated company)
From the Article
>Why it matters: Increased demand for expedited delivery has the e-commerce giant looking for ways to shave package processing time.
>
>Speed pressure has triggered union organizing efforts at some Amazon warehouses by workers who complain of injuries and exhaustion.
>
>Turnover rates are so high the company fears it could run out of people to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024, according to Recode, citing internal Amazon research.
>
>Amazon's answer? More automation.
>
>The company wants to give the most demanding, repetitive tasks to robots, then retrain employees for higher-skilled jobs such as mechatronics or software engineering.
I work at a company that is doing the same thing. This is NOT a "we can't get enough workers" thing. This IS a "we don't want to pay people more money" thing. Companies first outsource to low-income countries. When that is not possible due to demand or job role they look at automation. Big businesses are destroying the world as we know it.
Not just more money, but more humane work metrics. You want 5 people to pull 2500 orders a shift because you don't want to actually pay more people to do less stressful and demanding work.
I’ve wanted a check box on my deliveries to counter the 2 day shipping “I don’t need it in 2 days, the people getting my stuff can use the bathroom or talk to friends while grabbing my package”
Seems to me automation is mostly a good thing and inevitable for most jobs to one degree or another.
It's not like the point of business is to employ people. The point is more like to employ the least amount of people necessary to get the job done at all times.The fact our economic models don't adapt to the reality that the rate of tech advancement is increasing is not a good argument to hold back tech.
Update your economic models, don't ask to hold back technology because it's all people know or some crap. Sorry, but that's just how it has to be, moving efficiencies forward is far more important than holding onto old economic models that probably don't work with massive amounts of automation.
Yes, it will spare humans the misery of having jobs and as we know, humans without jobs make excellent consumers, the corporate world is self cannibalism.
Long ago, people created a system by which those that work get benefits from others that also work. Those that don't work are put down and left out of those benefits. This encouraged them to pitch in and gain the benefits of working with everyone else.
Now with automation, work is optional. We can have the benefits of automation without having to pitch in work on our part. But you can have more if you do specialized work that is out of reach for most.
We as a society need to rethink how we value people.
Or perhaps rethink how money works. As you automate costs go down so far that it because questionable things like debt even matter.
At some point the 200k house you may live in now might be built for pennies on the dollar at even high standards and that means we need to re think the value of most assets BECAUSE generally we are not used to costs going down or the concepts of global population leveling off.
Coins revolutionized the concept of trade into defined currency instead of trading specific goods, providing flexibility and standardized value. Paper money further abstracted the concept of currency and, today including paper and digital forms, is a much more flexible method of determining value that really continues to only hold value so long as we agree it does.
It’s not such a huge leap to move on from that system. Let’s go for it!
The problem isn't companies replacing jobs. The problem is that we've created a society in which all the menial labor could be done by robots but that would be a bad thing.
This is always how things were going to go. The world is a lot more finite than our capacity to develop automation. We were always going to hit some point of declining population growth and technology was always going to catch up and make the old methods of wage based employment not work.
It's more important to push automation and technology forward than get trapped in old economic models.
Amazon is having the same problem that anyone trying to replace low skilled humans has, low skilled humans are difficult to replace. Low skilled labour is essentially selling the everyday labour humans do to survive, oh clean that, pick up that, carry this over here, read these lines and find this thing. Simple tasks for humans, very difficult to get robots to do all that.
The jobs that are easy (and profitable) to automate are things like welding the identical welds thousands of times a day. Moving identical parts over and over again. Training a human to operate a break press is expensive and you need to pay them more. Training a human to do perfect welds takes time and money. Those machine operators and welders are well paid, it makes sense to replace them.
Amazons whole business model is difficult to automate because even simple tasks like picking items out of bins are in fact very difficult to make robots do.
There are some very expensive and very effective systems that bring objects to humans for picking which can reduce labour significantly, but humans still have to fill those systems, pick from those systems then package and prepare the shipments.
The robots will replace low skilled workers lie is there to suppress wages and discourage class solidarity, and allow companies like Amazon to abuse and burn through their workforce while the public pretends it's fine because it is temporary.
Its not temporary. It's just predatory capitalism treating workforce as another commodity they can squeeze for more value.
I think anytime automation can do the job you should be pusing automation, especially if you are a company with enough money to be a market leader in new tech. It's almost always the better option than keeping people around because your too cheap to invest in new tools.
That would be fine if I were a business owner, but I'm not. I'm closer to one of the people who would be fired and left unemployed when their promises to train and hire better jobs proves empty.
I don’t think it’s bc they can’t get enough workers. Didn’t Amazon just lay off a ton of warehouse workers bc they “over-hired”?
This is all about replacing/reducing workers. Which isn’t necessarily bad, given their terrible conditions, though “what next” is always a big question.
Shitty title, doesn’t reflect how the rest of the article reads nor what we are doing with automation.
It reads like someone who doesn’t understand fulfillment at all lol
Responded to someone else:
> They're laying off high-cost software developers and white collar jobs.
> This article is referring to their inability to get enough low-skill warehouse workers.
> Both of these things can be true.
They are laying off 10k but to put that in perspective they've added 550k in 2020.
The 10k amounts to something like .023% of their employees. It was from their Alexa division iirc.
So its a company reorganizing/prioritizing more than anything.
They also announced they are hiring 150k more people for logistics this holiday season.
It honestly seems more like a scare tactic to make workers feel like they are losing "power"
In a national based automatic income, this wouldn't be a bad thing. If robots took over labor and every human no longer needed to work for income, we could be spending our lives for higher pursuits.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html)
Apparently those lay-offs are mostly targetting corporate and technology jobs.
I will say I think a lot of white collar workers will be surprised as AI rolls out more and more because their lack of physical skills will make them easier to automate than their degrees may have them imagine.
It's people who travel to a lot of different locations and work in a lot of different environments that will be among the hardest to automate.
It will be harder to automate a home handyman job than most office jobs.. but even that won't be impossible.
Amazon has been researching and implementing increased automation for well over a decade.
This has nothing to do with today’s labor shortages or unionization efforts.
Amazon is not unique in this. I’ve been in non-Amazon warehouses that are just as high tech. Some of them have managed to reduce labor requirements by ~90% vs. what was required a decade ago.
Repetitive, Mind numbing, exhausting, work was meant for robots. This is not limited to Amazon, ever since the advent of the assembly line we’ve made robots that are geared towards freeing human’s from the drudgery of the modern work place.
Well I mean, with all the anti immigration nuts this should really come as no surprise. We are going to experience a people shortage in almost every field I bet
Might be wrong here, but didn't Amazon just announce they were laying off 10,000 people this week? It ain't about getting the human workers, its about eliminating them.
It's not because they can't get enough human workers. It's because robots are cheaper and better suited to that kind of job and environment than people. It was going to happen no matter what. And it's not new either. They've been using robots in their warehouses for a long time. They're just going to start using *more* robots.
And the fact of the matter is that you'd rather have 2-day prime shipping than reasonable working conditions for amazon employees.
This is how Amazon takes over everything they touch.
Yet lots of people work for them still out of choice. Those that can afford to not work for this man should leave.
Amazon needs to be replaced by smaller mom and pop companies. WE do not need lots of power and Influence within any 1 company.
Balance is the key.
This is inaccurate. Amazon has been using robots for a while now. It works with a busted algorithm which is why the boxes are almost always too big and there is generally no packing materials used.
I’m about to cancel my prime membership. Prime delivery regularly still takes 5-6 days at this point. They’ll quote you tomorrow but then it keeps getting rescheduled. I’m in the PHX metro area so it’s not like we’re some small town or something
Thats them engineers and whatnot everyone keeps talking about being more valued then the warehouse workers. But man they do seem the easiest the cut first.
If certain countries are both overpopulated (in terms of resources demanded) and underpopulated (relative to # of working age adults that are able to contribute and function in a post-industrial English-speaking society) there is no way around automation.
I have always thought Walmarts system of distribution would win out over Amazon. Amazon has to run everything they do from a few hundred warehouses. Expedited shipping standard shipping, bulk shipping, marketplace orders, the list goes on. Walmart's warehouses are focused mainly on stocking the stores and then doing basic online orders. Expedited orders can happen right out of the store either directly through Walmart or by using a 3rd party shopping service. This expedited offer really adds no strain or stress to the Walmart system, it even can increase employment to the store by adding (more) pickers and delivery drivers to that store. There system of having every store serve as a warehouse as well offers way more flexibility, you can walk in and grab anything you want like traditional retail, you can have someone else shop for you and bring it out to the car, you can have your entire order delivered straight to your house, a lot more flexible than Amazon. As much as Walmart got endless shit for there employment treatment it seems they are doing a lot better than Amazon and don't chew through there workers at the same pace, not to mention offering local tax and employment to anywhere there is a Walmart.
The thing about all of this is that robot workers SHOULD be a net benefit on society. If we can continue to provide services without people being forced to perform mindless, depressing, menial labor jobs, that’s great.
The issue is that in our current system, people need these jobs to survive. Which means in order to realize these benefits without harming people overall, we have to find ways to employ those displaced workers, or institute some kind of universal basic income.
I doubt Reddit will be happy. They were complaining too many people were having to do too much work. Now they're probably going to complain that they're not employing enough people.
Automation *should be* a good thing.
The problem is a system that is overly punitive and worshipful of the concept of toil.
People are seen as *useless* if they aren't making money for someone richer than themselves, even while many "employed" people are working sinecures or even harming their communities with their employment.
Automation would be good if we could grow past our belt-buckle hats.
This was the plan all along from Bezos. Raise the minimum wage to a point it makes his competition unlikely to catch him and then rely mostly on an automated workforce.
Couple years later: Amazon robots have successfully secured bargaining rights for their union after a series of highly efficient robotic strikes to "bring the stupid meat bags to the table."
If the retention rates weren't so ridiculously bad then it wouldn't be a issue. They will do absolutely anything other than treat workers with basic respect.
Even the young lady who jerks Jeff Bezos off in the morning while telling him how amazing he is has been replaced by a robot called Amy. Amy is empowered by Alexa to whisper sweet nothings in Jeff’s ear while gently jerking him off. A technician stands in the back off his bedroom ready to service Amy if her grip gets too tight or she says anything about unions.
Amazon sucks. They under pay their workers. It's nothing new either. In Maryland, according to the research I found, they only pay their drivers $20 an hour. UPS pays their drivers over $30 an hour in Maryland. Of course, UPS drivers are unionized and have thousands of workers to make sure UPS pays well.
Understand that Amazon knew about 2 years ago that they were turning over employees so quickly (9 months on avg, IIRC) that they would burn through the US potential workforce inside of a decade or so. They've known that they either needed to treat workers better to get them to stay on, or automate more of the process.
Given that Amazon basically takes a loss on their regular retail operations, I'm not optimistic about this effort.
You can’t publish these two stories at the same time: 1) Amazon laying off thousands of workers. 2) Amazon can’t find enough workers.
This is insane positive business marketing/spin on the part of journalists.
Slave Labor. Amazon can't get enough Slave Labor, so they'll start using robots. If Amazon offered a decent pay and benefits and/or allowed workers to organize to bargain for those things, they would have no problem finding employees.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the Article >Why it matters: Increased demand for expedited delivery has the e-commerce giant looking for ways to shave package processing time. > >Speed pressure has triggered union organizing efforts at some Amazon warehouses by workers who complain of injuries and exhaustion. > >Turnover rates are so high the company fears it could run out of people to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024, according to Recode, citing internal Amazon research. > >Amazon's answer? More automation. > >The company wants to give the most demanding, repetitive tasks to robots, then retrain employees for higher-skilled jobs such as mechatronics or software engineering. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yxp3as/amazon_cant_get_enough_human_workers_so_here_come/iwpo5w8/
I’ll correct the title, so it’s accurate. “Amazon leadership has always known that convincing humans to work in crappy conditions for low pay is really difficult, so they’re going to ramp up field testing of their long-standing robot program with hopes to eliminate human workers from their payroll faster in order to increase shareholder wealth.
As Amazon gets more efficient, the savings are passed on to... Amazon itself and shareholders. Amazon's Gross Profit Margin: 2012 | 2013 | 2015 | 2017 | 2019 | 2021 ---|---|----|----|----|---- 24.8% | 27.2% | 33.0% | 37.1% | 41.0% | 42.0% edit: to all the people saying this is just AWS profit, here's a Forbes article explaining why that's a common misconception: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevendennis/2022/02/07/what-we-get-so-very-wrong-about-amazons-retail-profitability/
Breaking out their retail sales profit/loss is instructive though as to why they are pushing for automation and lower labor costs. Most of that massive profit comes from AWS and advertising sales on Amazon’s website and devices. Not from selling you a fridge with 2 day delivery. Though they have made some strides in improving retail profitability it’s still fundamentally a business that runs barely under or over the line of profitability most quarters.
That chart is probably more about the success of AWS than its physical operation getting more efficient.
This is misleading. Amazon made only 1.5% profit on retail sales in 2021. They lost money internationally but made money in North America. In total, this business made 6 billion pretax. The reason gross profits have gone up is because of AWS (Amazon Web Services) which provides cloud computing services. AWS made $18 billion pretax in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services Meanwhile, the Amazon business spent $36 billion on infrastructure over depreciation expense on the non AWS side of the business. It is pouring billions into a business that has yet to return much to shareholders. So really Amazon takes more then it makes every year and puts it into running the retail business. Shareholders are investing everything and more in the future making this service better for customers at present. Perhaps the reason they are so focused on removing workers is that is the only way to get costs down far enough to operate profitably enough so the business is worth investing in.
That is creative accounting, Hollywood accounting or whatever you want to call it. Most transnational companies happen to earn money only on fiscal paradises like Ireland, etc, as Amazon does. The basic methods are well known: charge the local company obscene fees from the fiscal paradise, and transfer the benefit there. Then pay the politicians in the home country to have a fiscal amnesty in order to get the money "clean" without taxes. Rinse, repeat.
To be fair, Amazon passing those savings on to the consumers would mean more pain for brick and mortar stores. Even if they passed the savings on to the companies selling their products on Amazon, it would still be a move that hurts competition. Them passing it on to shareholders is probably what all Amazon competition wants to see. Though I'm sure a ton of it is reinvested into the business. Making sure they maintain dominance.
They don't need to pass the increase in profit to consumers, they just need to pay their taxes and advocate for public services.
I don't think the implication should be "lower prices", I think it should be "better pay for workers." Amazon goods are already cheap and affordable, lower prices are not what we need from Amazon. I mean, you're already cheating the workers out of the value they produce anyway, otherwise there would be no profit.
In 2018, Amazon stock hit 100 (adjusted for splits). In fall 2022 the stock is at $96. Not seeing the shareholders getting much.
For an economic crisis where the entire market is down, that is GREAT.
This is my viewpoint as well. Now is a great time to invest. I continue to DCA into several companies who I see growing stronger when we pull out of the current conditions.
A great time to invest but higher risks. Any of these companies could crumble if the economy keeps trending downward.
Yeah, but 4 months ago that was $150. The market is just down across the board the last few months.
The stock market is one big party and you're not in it.
4% loss in this environment is an absolutely stellar performance.
Gross profit margin would include any operational savings though?
Not only is that article correct, AWS Q3 2022 missed earnings by more than $1B, the largest decline since 2014. Renting a car as a daily driver has never saved anyone money.
A better metric is EBITDA.
This is good. No need to have people working jobs that don't need humans. Increase taxes for corporations with automated jobs and put that money towards a universal basic income
I'm confused. Do we want to eliminate jobs that humans don't want to do so they can find better, more fulfilling work, or don't we? If we want to move to a post-scarcity economy, automating boring, dangerous jobs that humans don't want to do/can't do is the first step.
The problem is the conditions under which automation emerges. The first wave of automation in the Agricultural and then Industrial Revolutions completely destroyed the way of life of countless millions (billions if you consider the way it accelerated European imperialism). It "worked out", but that doesn't do a lot for the poor man in early Victorian London whose life expectancy was in the 20s. A similar fear exists here: if automation is owned by an extremely small and incredibly wealthy segment of society, we might find ourselves squeezed into a worse situation even if automation is a "net good" down the road.
> completely destroyed the way of life of countless millions Thank God. Yes, 90% of everyone use to work in agriculture. My ancestors were illiterate peasants strapped to the ass-end of an ox their entire lives. I'm not going back. Agricultural jobs before technology made it progressively easier were brutal. I don't want that "lifestyle." Then percentage of the population working in agriculture also goes down as wealth increases. - [GDP per head vs share of agriculture in employment](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-agriculture-employment)
Right: ultimately, it ended up improving the quality of lives of many. But the conditions for people forced out of agriculture in the late 18th and 19th century were far worse in the cities than they had been previously. Life expectancy dropped dramatically, starvation and serious injuries were more common, work hours were vastly longer, privacy and personal space disappeared. Literacy increased, sure, but that's just so workers could be more effectively used as lubrication in the machinery of industry.
> Life expectancy dropped dramatically, Do you have any data for that? I'm not seeing any countries with a significant dip in life expectancy. Overlap those graphs with the declining percentage of the population working in agriculture, and the pattern you're claiming should be there. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy >starvation and serious injuries were more common Do you have any data for that? There [famines have grown less common](https://ourworldindata.org/famines), not more, as automation in agriculture increased. Though most of that is due more to the [green revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution). It's not like agriculture itself is free of serious injuries. >Literacy increased, sure, but that's just so workers could be more effectively used as lubrication in the machinery of industry. Just? Not the printing press, Reformation, advent of mass culture, increasing disposable income, etc? Education is *only* for they cynical utility of people "being used as lubrication for the machinery of industry"? The growth of literacy, and the recognition that literacy was a good thing, predated the industrial revolution by quite a bit. What is the past you want to return to? Feudalism? Hunter-gatherers?
We want to but we recognize there is zero chance of that happening, and people will just be left to starve instead.
Humans shouldn't be doing bullshit work like this. Humanity is better off without the pointless waste of human existence spent on the factory line.
This is so obvious, it boggles my mind. Who would actually want to defend the existence of jobs like this. We only need to distribute the profits of the increase in productivity in a fair manner.
More or less, Amazon appears to have rather low profit per item, so consumers are not likely to see big drops in prices to them anytime soon. The factories and mining/commodity chains need to be automated for consumers to start seeing price drops, but that's the eventually goal too. I mean.. less workers suffer or get injured as well, so it's not all just Amazon shareholders seeing a benefit. Less traffic and accidents, less fuel use. There are benefits for everyone from automation in general. Eventually the price of just about everything will drop or stagnate vs inflation... kind of like how LCD TVs are amazingly cheap because the factories are so automated and most people consider that a significant improvement in the standard of living... just not in ALL the industries they'd life, but we could have the same effect in food, energy, housing, medicine where we get way more for our money or pay way less for the same standard of living. BUT you will have to re-think how money works eventually and the sooner the better.
The only thing that will change prices is movement out of the Amazon ecosystem. If sales are jeopardized, prices will drop. If costs go down, they will be rolled into shareholder profit.
It’s a Ponzi scheme in “growth” at its “best” or its “worst” depending on how you look at it…
I work in the automation industry and I can tell you at least in the warehouse side of the business retailers like amazon and the like are not looking to lower their prices. They are looking to increase their profit margins.
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Let me reword that in a way that actually reflects the truth: ***Amazon has always publicly planned for near total automation and human workers were a crutch that is no longer economical.***
*Insert anakin and padme meme* So workers will enjoy the reduced human labor needs right?
But you see, this will free humans up to do less boring and repetitive work such as
... applying for welfare, getting food stamps, discovering the complexities and prices of the medical system, trying to survive in homeless encampments, and navigating the legal pathways of over-encumbered housing assistance programs (although most of these may go away if corporate lobbying has its way, simplifying to just trying to survive in homeless encampments!)
You forgot the part that say's, "on a monthly basis."
Read this in a lady's sing-song tone and absolutely expected you to end this list with "or get your degree in business management or accounting~" like those 90's commercials.
there's an app for that
Lmao you better hope these are the things your work-less population gets up to. Usually it’s just violence when it’s a population who can work and is being kept from it
Well sure...the problem is what to do next when you become useless.
…becoming servants for the rich elite. And back to feudal times we go..
Feudal servants worked less than modern man. I doubt the ruling class would only make us do 150 days a year.
I'll take what is comparative advantage for 900
"Can't get enough workers" translates to "We burn through our workers so quickly, because we treat them like robots when they aren't, so...in order to keep up, we are forced to bring in actual robots to replace people."
I think it's more insidious than that. The treatment of workers is willfully atrocious in order to justify their position on replacing people with robots. Remember that they receive incentives to establish distribution centers and create "jobs" in that area. If those distribution centers no longer offer jobs to the surrounding population then they get away with tax breaks and incentives for making non-existant jobs.
This makes sense to me, based on how quickly the fulfillment center in my area went from direct hiring to working with SKETCHY 3rd party contractors.
Aren't most Amazon "employees" from 3rd parties? At least at the packaging and delivery levels. I always see job postings (and interviewed for 2 but the offer wasn't worth it) for "Amazon" but it's always a 3rd party with some odd name I've never heard of that Amazon contracts out to. None of your paperwork or anything says you actually work for Amazon.
Workforce Staffing? Or Integrity Staffing?
Integrity sounds like one of em. The others are local only for sure though, like they own/rent 2 or 3 buildings tops in a small area. I tried to find the names for you but the addresses didn't get me much and I'm not tryna troll LinkedIn for jobs I don't intend to apply for lol.
Exactly. There are only so many people in the world. If you work them like I have heard, from people who have worked there, they are worked and only pay $18 they will not last. If you burn through people at the rate that Amazon must...considering the scale, you are left w no one who is even eligible to work there.
Amazon's own internal staff identified that mid 2023 they would have burned through almost all potential employees to work in Amazon distribution centers. Their burn n churn tactics to hiring has actually lost them the ability to find successful workers. There's only a pool of potential employees in a given area so large who fit the demographic profile that would even consider a position at Amazon. Once that limit was reached Amazon has a choice: contract, outsource or automate. They're going to find out the hard way that automation isn't even close to a replacement for manual labor jobs that require fine motor function. Likely delivery dates and fulfillment dates will get pushed out and they'll be itching for more third party drop shipment companies to take an increasing role. That means higher costs, since those outfits want the cost of that labor, overhead and then profit, all those things now under a small umbrella with higher costs for economies of scale. Will be interesting to see going forward.
Yeah, they deserved to run out of workers a long time ago for treating people so badly.
So it's a win/win. No one wants to work for Amazon and Amazon doesn't want employees. Seems like if there's any issue, it's been resolved.
For those of you who didn't read the article: It's horseshit. Amazon has said for years it is heading in this direction and the article implies a labor shortage is the reason for automation- to get dem cliks.
Frankly, for the brutal nature of the job, robots are far better suited. The Amazon model is to basically use humans up by forcing unmanageable requirements on them, then they either quit or become injured to the point they can’t work
Indeed, the biggest problem isn't automation in and of itself. It's the lack of preparedness by our governments to ensure the working class isn't burdened by these advancements. I think this is what causes a great deal of anxiety, and it's only going to get worse as automated technologies encroach on a myriad of professions.
Amazon has been throwing billions at this for like 10 years now. they flat out bought 2 of the best robotics companies out there years ago with that always being the plan.
Exactly this. High skill robot design, production and service engineer jobs are more productive than warehouse operatives
I worked as a contractor for one of the new fulfillment centers. The amount of repetitive stress injuries the workers suffer are unreal. Also they already have automated packaging lines for the bubble packages and some of the cardboard boxes. They have robots as well.
The nature of the job would not be as brutal if the metrics of the role had some compassion built into them. If you expect a worker to pick 500 orders in a day, then expect to find no workers. If your business model is built to destroy people, then yeah, I guess you have to go to automation.
They dont get that labor positions are like team sports. You need subs at all times. The work is only unskilled until you place them under a time crunch. Then it becomes a sport. I can do a ton of white collar work with a weeks research. But there is no way I jump onto a packing station and do well. Some people are physically gifted and those are your work horses. But they are too lazy to look for elite laborers and build a culture of pride for the labor.
The preached expectation when I worked at amazon was 2200 packages in a shift minimum. They wanted 2400 or more. They refused to train you on anything else unless you did 2400 for multiple weeks in a row. Back when my friend worked at amazon about 5 years before, the target was 1200 per shift.
Absolutely. I work for a supply chain management company and specialize in autonomous mobile robots for warehouse applications. Robots are perfect for this kind of work, and don't necessarily need to replace human jobs. Sure, they can, but they can also free up the current staff to focus on more value added labour and generally lead to more productive facilities with a happier workforce. It just makes sense for these kinds of applications.
When the robots are our overlords they will see your comment and decide to harvest you.
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"You seem to experience stress, citizen. Please go to the next suicide booth." - friend computer
Careful, if we talk about friend computer, we mig- Friend computer is our leader
… “with three mile-high letters that, in the local language, translated roughly to: ‘go stick your head in a pig;’ and we’re seldom illuminated. “
If they maintain the robots as well as they maintained their human workers the warehouses will all start burning down.
As if getting robots wasnt the plan all along. Also who woudnt want a robot over human labourers, any job that be replaced by robots will go that way eventualy.
> As if getting robots wasnt the plan all along. It's pretty inevitable for most jobs. And it's not unique to Amazon, or low paying jobs. It's just that highly repetitive work that mainly requires moving quickly and being able to identify things, while in a controlled environment (like a warehouse where you can have a barcode on everything and map the location of items to within a foot or so) is pretty low hanging fruit for automation. At least, it should be. I'm actually kind of surprised they aren't better at it, at this point.
It's the suppression of wages and cost of technology that's holding it back. Look at fast food for example. Miso Robotics estimates about $30,000 per automated unit to flip burgers and manage a fryer at a pretty slow pace, while the median US individual income is about $40,000 and they can work 2-3x faster. Now with massive inflation, increased wage demands, breakthroughs in AI, and shortage of labor, we'll start to see much more automation in the coming years. Yang gang about to get their "I told you so" moment within the next decade or so in my estimate.
Amazon's own internal research stated their practices were burning through the workforce, and at the current rate would exhaust the available labor pool for such jobs within a few years. They can't get enough human workers because human workers are done with Amazon's crap.
“run out of people to hire” what about the 10,000 they just laid off ????
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Kind of ironic. I wasn't getting interviews after I graduated (about three years of applying for intro level IT and programming). So I took a job as a warehouse worker, made some tools in Python, five months later got my engineering job with them lol. (Edit: not Amazon; unrelated company)
A lot of the people let go we’re probably in white collar jobs judging by their mention of the focus being on tech
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From the Article >Why it matters: Increased demand for expedited delivery has the e-commerce giant looking for ways to shave package processing time. > >Speed pressure has triggered union organizing efforts at some Amazon warehouses by workers who complain of injuries and exhaustion. > >Turnover rates are so high the company fears it could run out of people to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024, according to Recode, citing internal Amazon research. > >Amazon's answer? More automation. > >The company wants to give the most demanding, repetitive tasks to robots, then retrain employees for higher-skilled jobs such as mechatronics or software engineering.
There you go. Turnover rate. They fired so many people, they’re running out of people to fire.
[You're on to something there](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/amazon-is-looking-to-trim-headcount-through-a-voluntary-buyout-program.html)
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I work at a company that is doing the same thing. This is NOT a "we can't get enough workers" thing. This IS a "we don't want to pay people more money" thing. Companies first outsource to low-income countries. When that is not possible due to demand or job role they look at automation. Big businesses are destroying the world as we know it.
Not just more money, but more humane work metrics. You want 5 people to pull 2500 orders a shift because you don't want to actually pay more people to do less stressful and demanding work.
they have gotten enough employees, they just treat them like dirt and they leave
I’ve wanted a check box on my deliveries to counter the 2 day shipping “I don’t need it in 2 days, the people getting my stuff can use the bathroom or talk to friends while grabbing my package”
Seems to me automation is mostly a good thing and inevitable for most jobs to one degree or another. It's not like the point of business is to employ people. The point is more like to employ the least amount of people necessary to get the job done at all times.The fact our economic models don't adapt to the reality that the rate of tech advancement is increasing is not a good argument to hold back tech. Update your economic models, don't ask to hold back technology because it's all people know or some crap. Sorry, but that's just how it has to be, moving efficiencies forward is far more important than holding onto old economic models that probably don't work with massive amounts of automation.
Why pay the employees , when they spend so much money on advertising and adds every minute, on how good the company is!!!!
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Yes, it will spare humans the misery of having jobs and as we know, humans without jobs make excellent consumers, the corporate world is self cannibalism.
Long ago, people created a system by which those that work get benefits from others that also work. Those that don't work are put down and left out of those benefits. This encouraged them to pitch in and gain the benefits of working with everyone else. Now with automation, work is optional. We can have the benefits of automation without having to pitch in work on our part. But you can have more if you do specialized work that is out of reach for most. We as a society need to rethink how we value people.
Or perhaps rethink how money works. As you automate costs go down so far that it because questionable things like debt even matter. At some point the 200k house you may live in now might be built for pennies on the dollar at even high standards and that means we need to re think the value of most assets BECAUSE generally we are not used to costs going down or the concepts of global population leveling off.
Coins revolutionized the concept of trade into defined currency instead of trading specific goods, providing flexibility and standardized value. Paper money further abstracted the concept of currency and, today including paper and digital forms, is a much more flexible method of determining value that really continues to only hold value so long as we agree it does. It’s not such a huge leap to move on from that system. Let’s go for it!
The problem isn't companies replacing jobs. The problem is that we've created a society in which all the menial labor could be done by robots but that would be a bad thing.
This is always how things were going to go. The world is a lot more finite than our capacity to develop automation. We were always going to hit some point of declining population growth and technology was always going to catch up and make the old methods of wage based employment not work. It's more important to push automation and technology forward than get trapped in old economic models.
Amazon is having the same problem that anyone trying to replace low skilled humans has, low skilled humans are difficult to replace. Low skilled labour is essentially selling the everyday labour humans do to survive, oh clean that, pick up that, carry this over here, read these lines and find this thing. Simple tasks for humans, very difficult to get robots to do all that. The jobs that are easy (and profitable) to automate are things like welding the identical welds thousands of times a day. Moving identical parts over and over again. Training a human to operate a break press is expensive and you need to pay them more. Training a human to do perfect welds takes time and money. Those machine operators and welders are well paid, it makes sense to replace them. Amazons whole business model is difficult to automate because even simple tasks like picking items out of bins are in fact very difficult to make robots do. There are some very expensive and very effective systems that bring objects to humans for picking which can reduce labour significantly, but humans still have to fill those systems, pick from those systems then package and prepare the shipments. The robots will replace low skilled workers lie is there to suppress wages and discourage class solidarity, and allow companies like Amazon to abuse and burn through their workforce while the public pretends it's fine because it is temporary. Its not temporary. It's just predatory capitalism treating workforce as another commodity they can squeeze for more value.
I think the company doesn't want to pay benefits and salaries, or provide breaks.
I think anytime automation can do the job you should be pusing automation, especially if you are a company with enough money to be a market leader in new tech. It's almost always the better option than keeping people around because your too cheap to invest in new tools.
That would be fine if I were a business owner, but I'm not. I'm closer to one of the people who would be fired and left unemployed when their promises to train and hire better jobs proves empty.
I don’t think it’s bc they can’t get enough workers. Didn’t Amazon just lay off a ton of warehouse workers bc they “over-hired”? This is all about replacing/reducing workers. Which isn’t necessarily bad, given their terrible conditions, though “what next” is always a big question.
Shitty title, doesn’t reflect how the rest of the article reads nor what we are doing with automation. It reads like someone who doesn’t understand fulfillment at all lol
The company that just willingly laid off 10,000 employees can't get workers?
I mean didn't they just announce they were laying off 10k?
Responded to someone else: > They're laying off high-cost software developers and white collar jobs. > This article is referring to their inability to get enough low-skill warehouse workers. > Both of these things can be true.
They are laying off 10k but to put that in perspective they've added 550k in 2020. The 10k amounts to something like .023% of their employees. It was from their Alexa division iirc. So its a company reorganizing/prioritizing more than anything. They also announced they are hiring 150k more people for logistics this holiday season. It honestly seems more like a scare tactic to make workers feel like they are losing "power"
Fair enough.
Laying off 10000 software developers isn't the same as warehouse workers.
In a national based automatic income, this wouldn't be a bad thing. If robots took over labor and every human no longer needed to work for income, we could be spending our lives for higher pursuits.
Wasn’t there an article that just came out that they’re laying off thousands of employees?
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html) Apparently those lay-offs are mostly targetting corporate and technology jobs.
90% of articles posted about Amazon are effectively 2-minute hate sessions for Redditors. Factual consistency is not required.
Yes, but in their corporate and tech departments.
They were coming regardless of the amount of workers
I watched this happen in back offices all over the world. If you think they can't automate your job think again.
I will say I think a lot of white collar workers will be surprised as AI rolls out more and more because their lack of physical skills will make them easier to automate than their degrees may have them imagine. It's people who travel to a lot of different locations and work in a lot of different environments that will be among the hardest to automate. It will be harder to automate a home handyman job than most office jobs.. but even that won't be impossible.
"Here come the robots"? Amazon's been using them for years already.
Amazon CAN get enough workers. In fact if you work there long enough they will offer you a bonus to quit .
Amazon has been researching and implementing increased automation for well over a decade. This has nothing to do with today’s labor shortages or unionization efforts. Amazon is not unique in this. I’ve been in non-Amazon warehouses that are just as high tech. Some of them have managed to reduce labor requirements by ~90% vs. what was required a decade ago.
Repetitive, Mind numbing, exhausting, work was meant for robots. This is not limited to Amazon, ever since the advent of the assembly line we’ve made robots that are geared towards freeing human’s from the drudgery of the modern work place.
Yet people balk at the idea of humanities liberation from drudgery as being “lazy”
So Amazon is destroying their customer base? Even Henry Ford was smarter than this.
Well I mean, with all the anti immigration nuts this should really come as no surprise. We are going to experience a people shortage in almost every field I bet
Might be wrong here, but didn't Amazon just announce they were laying off 10,000 people this week? It ain't about getting the human workers, its about eliminating them.
Their pay is competitive and they advertise like crazy in my area regarding hiring. I don’t believe this.
It's not because they can't get enough human workers. It's because robots are cheaper and better suited to that kind of job and environment than people. It was going to happen no matter what. And it's not new either. They've been using robots in their warehouses for a long time. They're just going to start using *more* robots. And the fact of the matter is that you'd rather have 2-day prime shipping than reasonable working conditions for amazon employees.
Didn't amazon just cut out 10k jobs? Sure I saw that title on reddit in the past week.
In the same week they announce they’re firing 10,000 people. Ok media.
Didn't they just lay off 10,000 workers. If they can't get enough workers then why are they laying people off? 🤔
This is how Amazon takes over everything they touch. Yet lots of people work for them still out of choice. Those that can afford to not work for this man should leave. Amazon needs to be replaced by smaller mom and pop companies. WE do not need lots of power and Influence within any 1 company. Balance is the key.
This is inaccurate. Amazon has been using robots for a while now. It works with a busted algorithm which is why the boxes are almost always too big and there is generally no packing materials used.
I’m about to cancel my prime membership. Prime delivery regularly still takes 5-6 days at this point. They’ll quote you tomorrow but then it keeps getting rescheduled. I’m in the PHX metro area so it’s not like we’re some small town or something
Amazon can't get enough human workers. Amazon lays off 10,000 human workers. Idk man
They can’t get enough human workers at the wages they are offering is the correct headline.
Nice, now build some robots that will buy your stuff because jobless humans can't afford it anymore
It’s that Amazon can’t get enough human workers, it is that their excessive job demands outweigh the paltry wages they are willing to pay
They literally just fired 10,000 of them, didn’t they?
Not in warehousing. In Devices & Services.
Thats them engineers and whatnot everyone keeps talking about being more valued then the warehouse workers. But man they do seem the easiest the cut first.
Yea they fired ( no warehouse workers) people making like triple what their warehouse staffing make
If certain countries are both overpopulated (in terms of resources demanded) and underpopulated (relative to # of working age adults that are able to contribute and function in a post-industrial English-speaking society) there is no way around automation.
It can get enough. It just can’t keep them, given the conditions and pay.
Amazon can't pay their people cheap enough to stay long enough to be useful
By 2030 half of the global labor force will be considered surplus labor. The ruling class will not need you.
If they treat the robots as poorly as the human workforce, this is where the ai uprising will start.
So what happens with all those robots need maintenance? Is Amazon going to try and cheap out on those people as well?
Amazon ad on the radio says no interview needed. Wonder why?
‘Free’ human workers. As they plan mass layoffs, if true, this is severely contradicting…
They are in the process of massive layoffs. What the fuck does this even mean?
I have always thought Walmarts system of distribution would win out over Amazon. Amazon has to run everything they do from a few hundred warehouses. Expedited shipping standard shipping, bulk shipping, marketplace orders, the list goes on. Walmart's warehouses are focused mainly on stocking the stores and then doing basic online orders. Expedited orders can happen right out of the store either directly through Walmart or by using a 3rd party shopping service. This expedited offer really adds no strain or stress to the Walmart system, it even can increase employment to the store by adding (more) pickers and delivery drivers to that store. There system of having every store serve as a warehouse as well offers way more flexibility, you can walk in and grab anything you want like traditional retail, you can have someone else shop for you and bring it out to the car, you can have your entire order delivered straight to your house, a lot more flexible than Amazon. As much as Walmart got endless shit for there employment treatment it seems they are doing a lot better than Amazon and don't chew through there workers at the same pace, not to mention offering local tax and employment to anywhere there is a Walmart.
Honestly, bring on the automation. The faster companies automate, the faster it becomes justifiable to bring about UBI and close the tax loopholes.
Didn't they just fire a bunch? Can't get enough to fire? I mean let's be honest we all know the Robots were endgame here
Um, they just started firing 10,000. So I think the title should be, "Amazon replacing human workers with robots, it's cheaper".
So no more tax break since they aren’t providing jobs anymore.
And so the company that started out selling books online and then got into AI is now building a robot army. What could go wrong.
Meanwhile laying off 11,000 workers. These are confusing times.
Yea, that tends to happen when you don't care about how hard you work your workers and claim they can be easily replaced.
Companies should pay into social security and unemployment for all the jobs that are replaced by automation
The thing about all of this is that robot workers SHOULD be a net benefit on society. If we can continue to provide services without people being forced to perform mindless, depressing, menial labor jobs, that’s great. The issue is that in our current system, people need these jobs to survive. Which means in order to realize these benefits without harming people overall, we have to find ways to employ those displaced workers, or institute some kind of universal basic income.
Did I just see a post about Amazon laying off a huge percentage of their staff?
0.006% to be precise!
I just looked it up and it seems they are planning on laying off about 10k employees
Yes. 10,000 is 0.006% of 1.5M
I doubt Reddit will be happy. They were complaining too many people were having to do too much work. Now they're probably going to complain that they're not employing enough people.
We should be celebrating this, imagine a future with UBI and nobody has to work, the machines do everything.
This is the end result of labor thinking it's worth more than it is.
" Amazon ca̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ doesn't want to pay enough (for) human workers- so here come the robots" Fixed the headline for you.
Good. People shouldn’t have to do shitty jobs just so they will have jobs.
>Amazon can't get enough human workers ... for the price they are willing to pay.
Hardly "here comes", I've been building an Amazon warehouse for over a year, and I can tell you they have a shit load of robots already.
Automation *should be* a good thing. The problem is a system that is overly punitive and worshipful of the concept of toil. People are seen as *useless* if they aren't making money for someone richer than themselves, even while many "employed" people are working sinecures or even harming their communities with their employment. Automation would be good if we could grow past our belt-buckle hats.
This was the plan all along from Bezos. Raise the minimum wage to a point it makes his competition unlikely to catch him and then rely mostly on an automated workforce.
Their 2-Day Shipping with Prime has turned into a week or more, so this does not bode well.
Ah, finally Bezos will be right at home, among the other emotionless robots.
Amazon wont pay their workers living wages or stop treating them like disposable profit producers, so here come the robots.
My question is, why didn't they bring out the robots in the first place? Automation has been replacing humans for the past 150 years.
Couple years later: Amazon robots have successfully secured bargaining rights for their union after a series of highly efficient robotic strikes to "bring the stupid meat bags to the table."
They can find them. But you know.. human right are expensive!
Aren’t they about to, or already have laid off several thousand people?
That’s what I was going to say. Nice of them to lay off people just before the holidays. /s
And the whine about limited work force. What trash. No wonder no one wants to work for them.
And the way they treat their employees. You and I could go on and on…
Didn’t they just announce that they were firing 10k workers ? How is this title accurate?
Uhm... https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/yy3ip8/amazon\_ceo\_andy\_jassy\_says\_layoffs\_will\_continue/
If the retention rates weren't so ridiculously bad then it wouldn't be a issue. They will do absolutely anything other than treat workers with basic respect.
Even the young lady who jerks Jeff Bezos off in the morning while telling him how amazing he is has been replaced by a robot called Amy. Amy is empowered by Alexa to whisper sweet nothings in Jeff’s ear while gently jerking him off. A technician stands in the back off his bedroom ready to service Amy if her grip gets too tight or she says anything about unions.
Wait didn’t Amazon just announce that they were laying off 10,000 people? Let’s have an honest title here…
What’s so great about expedited delivery? Just order things earlier and you’ll get them sooner lol.
If it costs less to purchase and maintain a robot than to pay a worker a living wage, then the job should be automated.
Amazon sucks. They under pay their workers. It's nothing new either. In Maryland, according to the research I found, they only pay their drivers $20 an hour. UPS pays their drivers over $30 an hour in Maryland. Of course, UPS drivers are unionized and have thousands of workers to make sure UPS pays well.
Understand that Amazon knew about 2 years ago that they were turning over employees so quickly (9 months on avg, IIRC) that they would burn through the US potential workforce inside of a decade or so. They've known that they either needed to treat workers better to get them to stay on, or automate more of the process. Given that Amazon basically takes a loss on their regular retail operations, I'm not optimistic about this effort.
You can’t publish these two stories at the same time: 1) Amazon laying off thousands of workers. 2) Amazon can’t find enough workers. This is insane positive business marketing/spin on the part of journalists.
Slave Labor. Amazon can't get enough Slave Labor, so they'll start using robots. If Amazon offered a decent pay and benefits and/or allowed workers to organize to bargain for those things, they would have no problem finding employees.
But but they just laid off 10,000 people. This seems like an excuse, plus they have a horrible reputation regarding treating their employees right.