As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If I remember correctly (don't quote me on that) Amazon used to employ quite a lot of temporary workers and had a high turnover (hire/quit) rate. Then they would no need to purposefully fire anyone to reduce their headcount. Just not temp hiring those people would be enough. Or not hiring as many people as befoe as they grow. Or ... My point: there are many ways of making it look good on paper; but when a robot does a human job, that job is not needed anymore.
What IMO we need to do is to keep on discussing structural unemployment from all points of view.
For that matter, not any different from a typical person. Expenses that you would be better off not incurring are, by definition, frivolous. In the case of Amazon, frivolous spending at any level changes the price at which they can achieve a fair margin and reduces customer satisfaction.
Their constant argument every time is "we have no viruses, why do we spend money on this" and I have to tell them every single time "that you're paying for it is WHY we don't have viruses." They have no idea what viruses are, what malware is, what ransomware is and despite being hired to maintain infrastructure, I must continuously explain my decisions to people who do not maintain infrastructure and wouldn't know how with a gun to their head. This, to me, is stupid.
Nobody hires someone outside their domain of expertise and then leaves them to do whatever. Your constantly justifying your recommendations is, like it or not, a critical part of your job.
You're vastly underestimating what sort of effects "peak season" has. UPS hires 95,000 temporary employees each year; FedEx hires 50,000. Amazon hires 120,000. Retail scales up similarly, but I'm less familiar with the industry.
"A few thousand" is how much single distribution centers scale up employment.
So Amazon currently hires 120,000 people at $12/hr for 10 weeks for a total cost of somewhere near $576M. This counts as COGS and is included in their gross margin. If we just multiply that figure by (52 / 10) and subtract out the $576M, we can see that it would decrease their annual Gross Margin by $2.5B. Add on an additional 30% of the combined $3B in salary expense since I doubt the temp workers get benefits, and you'd be looking at a total of ~$3.4 billion.
So in 2016, this would've changed their gross income from $47.7 (35% GM) billion to $44.3 billion (32.5% GM).
https://a16z.com/2014/09/05/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-wh...
I wonder if you would still act so idealistically if you held stock in the company..
Side note; I do hold stock in the company, and because I'm not an asshole, I do think they should rely less on temp labor and they should improve working conditions for their existing warehouse workers. Even if it reduces my capital gains by some fraction of a percent.
Do you have any data to support your thesis of net job loss correlated to increased automation?
Well, the article does literally say "No people were laid off when the robots were installed, and Amazon found new roles for the displaced workers, Mr. Clark said.". Either Mr. Clark is lying, or this point is moot.
After the robots, they could have 115 employees working and still not laid anyone off. Yet, in terms of full time employment, they went from 150 to 115 and in terms of temp labor went from 150 to 0.
Did the robots destroy jobs in such a case? I'd think "yes". (I still support the deployment of robots in such cases; I'm only responding to the logical argument here, not the philosophical implications thereof.)
Why would they retain employees which they would not rehire (minus wages in place of hiring cost)? They have no obligation to retain these workers, so clearly Amazon's base (non-seasonal) demand for labour increases fast enough to justify retaining them. At the current rate you would expect them to hire more labour, not less. The human jobs described here are still so far beyond current robotic technology that it's likely there will be no easy gains in automation here. Meanwhile, as Amazon's efficiency increases, throughput will also increase, which means demand for labour will continue to increase even if there are marginal increases in automation.
For good relations with the Government which has a goal of decreasing unemployment, and avoiding bad PR in popular media? If you can wait a couple of months to achieve exactly the same outcome with fewer risks, why not.
> Meanwhile, as Amazon's efficiency increases, throughput will also increase
No, throughput is a function of demand, not efficiency, unless Amazon is currently backlogged.
This. Technically, centralisation has given amazon the scale to automate. Socially, that same scale of centralisation exposes them to more critical eyes. Their main vulnerability I guess...
The reallocation of labor during the throes of the industrial revolution worked because the new technologies needed constant care and babysitting. Reliable machines that need infrequent service will not need much maintenance staff.
It all sounds like wishful thinking or, indeed, a political PR spin.
It looks like they've used the automation to densify the shelving in the warehouse, and they've streamlined the picker and placer jobs. So the same square footage of warehouse, and same headcount, now has substantially more storage, and higher throughput.
Which probably allows savings on the number of facilities they need to operate, or at least the rate at which they build them.
In Germany, the net effect is that you thousands of apprentice positions free and at the same time thousands of people looking for such positions. The requirements of today's positions are now to high for many young people.
So we have a gap between educated people and worker people which is growing extremely fast. This results in a society which is polarizing itself more and more. This is not good on the long term.
As an employer, I find it extremely hard to find qualified people, and my entrepreneur friends are having even harder times, with people showing up for their first day of work either drunk, or not at all.
The 3.7% unemployment rate in Germany is considering something doing a part-time job for less than €400 per month as employed and the long term unemployed people are not part of the stats, the youths are also not in, etc. They are very good at removing many from the stats.
If you look at the industrial core of Germany, the Rhein/Ruhr region, you see cities after cities cut in two, one side with 35% of population living from social support and the other side with just 5%. When you "start" your life in the wrong side, you are out of the employment stats right from the start.
Note: I am French, living in Gelsenkirchen (such a typical city) and here, we have really hard time finding good engineers even with very good compensation and at the same time we have parts of the city where Doctors without Borders opened a station because the situation is catastrophic.
Are you sure about this? Here germany is not listed as country where they are currently have projects.
https://www.aerzte-ohne-grenzen.de/unsere-arbeit/einsatzlaen...
Everyone thinks they are offering good compensation, regardless of whether it actually is. Somehow, I doubt you'd have the issue if you offered 100k.
Numbers like 170k aren't seen too often in software engineering in Germany as far as I'm aware.
If you offer 100k (or 1M or whatever) you just move one engineer from another company to yours. So the other company now has a hard time finding a good engineer. If you increase your salary scale you will get an engineer who is moved away soon by another company which pays more money. In an optimal market, with p% missing engineers you will have p% of your positions open.
You can't plug holes with this strategy. The holes move around while salaries are increasing.
I've worked for a company that payed at the top 10% of salaries and we still couldn't find enough engineers.
But we would need to measure the elasticity of the engineering job market.
E.g. how much more people are becoming engineer if the average salary is going from 150k to 200k, as the salary scale compared to others is already high and should already pull people in.
If people aren't choosing the field, no matter how much you are offering new grads, it's an outreach problem and you solve it by making sure people have that information when they are making the decision. Or any other information, really, do you offer relocation assistance? Are your potential hires aware of that? Etc.
It seems to work relatively well for oil companies (else they wouldn't be doing it, right?).
>You can't plug holes with this strategy.
It's too late to be looking for crew when your ship is sinking.
>The holes move around while salaries are increasing.
Yes, of course. But eventually the 'musical chairs' make people move to a higher paying position, and the hole isn't even in your region/country anymore. At least not in your company. The issue with the strategy doesn't seem to be that it doesn't work, just that it takes too long to.
>I've worked for a company that payed at the top 10% of salaries and we still couldn't find enough engineers.
As the other poster mentioned, 10% of what? If the best people from France and Germany are already in Switzerland, you need to compete with Swiss companies, not the local ones that just take what's left.
With salaries in Berlin of $80k and >$100k or $150k in the valley, they currently don't think there is money made in that field? Wow. I do consider $100k a lot of money but YMMV.
"offer relocation assistance?"
Yes everyone I know does this.
"Are your potential hires aware of that?"
Yes.
"It seems to work relatively well for oil companies"
I have no data on oil companies or any experience with oil companies and if they have problems with finding enought good engineers or not. If you have any data, would be interesting, especially on the elasticity of that job market.
I can only speak about software development and hiring people for 20+ years, no clue about other fields.
"you need to compete with Swiss companies"
So I increase the salary to compete with Swiss companies, they increase salaries, holes move around.
Aside from that I assume Swiss companies already have their own holes - at least considering all the executive search calls I get.
You only can plug the holes with more engineers, not higher salaries (above a certain point). And it's questionable you can pull in more people into CS when salaries are already very high compared to most other occupations (but I have no numbers on the elasticity of the engineering job market).
Also: If most ads do not show salary information, how can I get more good engineers interviewing with higher salaries? The problem was not getting good engineers when they showed up for an interview, the problem was getting enough resumes - a problem everyone has outside Google,FB,...
We did some A/B testing on job ads, including salary information did not help. I'm a proponent for
https://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator
But yes, I would double the salary and let go of half of the people if joining a company as CTO, I'm not against increasing salaries, but they don't close holes from my experience.
As a German I'm astonished, there are no hospitals?
This list gives 6 hospitals:
https://www.kliniken.de/krankenhaus/deutschland/ort/gelsenki...
Hospitals full?
Too many people without home who have no health insurance? (Main reason here in Berlin for doctors working in their spare time outside hospitals) Most people - with the exception of failed entrepreneurs - should have health insurance - you must have one if you have a job and there is one if you're on social security payments.
Any links? Doctors without Borders and Gelsenkirchen does not turn up anything in Google.
I can't find any reference to this station online (neither operated nor planned) and have never heard of anything remotely close (I work in the field). On the contrary, currently capacity is being reduced in the region due to permanently vacant hospital beds.
There are some stations for people without health insurance (usually undocumented people that fear detection). The nearest one should be in Duisburg operated by Malteser. Note that those are not because of low capacity but due to documentation requirements at regular hospitals.
> They are very good at removing many from the stats.
This is done by each and every single country, Germany is nothing special here. Very detailed numbers of all those groups usually "excluded" from the main headline statistic are published along with it. There is nothing being hidden. There are also ILO unemployment statistics calculated with the same methodology worldwide, they too look very good (and improving).
You can find plenty of people with a high school education but training one of them is less efficient then spending more time looking and more money on a qualified person. Which translates to nobody using a large swath of the labor force.
Uh is that statistical? Or just like one drunk person?
The obvious solution to this is to make more people qualified, not to prop up "simple jobs" that aren't economically viable.
As this is an interesting topic to me, how many people have you qualified and what was the ratio of people failing? When I've qualified people, I could make around 25% of people good coders, others I've talked to have similar numbers.
If you have higher numbers, I would be highly interested in the "how".
Interesting, completely different from my teaching and CTO experience. Also interesting it looks very different from German universities, where e.g. in Berlin the majority of students I've interviewed can't do FizzBuzz in an online interview.
How would you assess "good programmer"?
From a very practical point of view, mine would be something like can write a feature on his/her own, gets transactions correct, doesn't create performance bugs that show in live systems, good maintainable, readable, understandable architecture. We definetly could not get everybody on that level even with a lot of mentoring.
We had a CTO meetup recently and mostly everyone shared the same experience.
Coming back, would be interested in "How would you assess good programmer"?
There's things that can make it take longer of course. If you're not familiar with computers at all, or have never even owned a computer in your life of course you will take longer to learn. If you are not an analytical person you will have to train your brain. If you're bad at even basic math you'll have to learn that too. You may have to do more learning than other people to learn to code but you can still do it.
It's more like playing piano, some have the ear for music and some don't (I haven't although I love Mahler ;-) And putting a lot of effort into learning to play piano, many people are not becoming the equivalent of "good engineers".
I'm holding workshops "Coding for managers" to C-level and VCs. I agree with "You don't have to be born a genius or super special to do it", many people are astonished when they write their first code.
Incidently I will give a workshop here inhouse today to non-programmers.
Funnily enough, those people are exactly the group that doesn't need to pivot their careers.
Even if you can't make a former manufacturing worker into a programmer, you can still try to have more programmers in the next generation.
There's an interesting talk that you might be able to find[1] about abstract reasoning, and how people weren't able to do it just a couple hundred years ago - "what's the difference between a fish and a bird?": "you can eat the fish". No reason why the next generation couldn't be more suited to software engineering jobs than we are now.
1 - I vaguely remember it was something about an old survey of Russian far east villagers (who live(d) as they did hundreds of years ago, for all intents and purposes).
It's bloomberg.
> Trying to sell it like no jobs are lost is quite naive at best, and purposefully misleading at worst.
I agree that it comes off as very cynical and feels like a PR piece for amazon and automation.
Also, the problem isn't just that current amzn employees aren't being fired. The problem is also that hiring of NEW employee hiring could be significantly curtailed and wages could stagnate. Not to mention how this would affect local businesses.
AMZN is a major employee during holiday season. Would be interesting how things work out going forward.
And i'm sure the story for the bottom 50% of employees is even worse.
The trend is downwards, and the internet accelerated it. Does anyone think that robots and a massive technology boom that may soon happen won't accelerate it ? Why ?
And from that trend, given minimum wage, it seems that at some point in time, we'll have large unemployment.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...
Look at businesses being dominated by companies that can afford high fixed costs in order to gain huge economies of scale. Good luck opening a mom-and-pop grocery next to a Wal-Mart, or even an independent gas station within two miles of a Sheetz.
However we do not live in a society with static rules. Corporations and to a lesser extent individuals are constantly competing and lobbying to get rules changes in their favor, look at the current net neutrality fight. If workers have an ever decreasing share of GDP then they have an ever decreasing amount of power with which to counter that lobbying or lobby for themselves, and it's the sort of thing that can snowball
Example: even when corrected for purchasing power, the vast majority of people on earth are poorer than the bottom 10% in the US. Yet they tend to do much better on those measures above than absolute definition of poverty would suggest.
Concentration of wealth leads to the ability to outcompete any small business, increasing the risk of operating independently. It's like playing blackjack in a casino. Even if you could eke out a small statistical advantage, the house can stay solvent longer than you can through volatility (and that assumes an otherwise level legal/regulatory/lobbying framework).
Even Silicon Valley's startup culture implicitly acknowledges this - bootstrapped companies are a footnote. Only those companies with the financial resources of insanely wealthy investors stand a chance at mainstream success. That means the (decreasing proportion) of insanely wealthy people have a growing amount of say in what companies are allowed to succeed.
Perhaps seizing the means of production is the way to go ;)
In all seriousness though, Even starting a small business requires a decently large buffer that most people simply don't have. Hard to build one if you're surviving on mimimum wage + food stamps. Living paycheck to paycheck is a real thing. Especially if you have family
It's very common, we've seen it with e.g. internet providers here; big international ISP takes over one of the major cable companies here, they invest heavily in marketing and go under the price of competitors - and thanks to billions in investment money they can keep that up for years -, the competitors lose money and customers until eventually the big one takes over. Monopoly, and then they start increasing the price again. 5-10 year plans. Amazon can do the same with businesses. Walmart, Target, etc all took local businesses and the middle class out of business when they landed in towns.
That does not preclude GDP from growing as iPhones are still selling and Google searches are still returning ads.
I see the benefits of "relieving" humans of boring jobs, but most of the article seems like a weird PR spin. Nobody got fired because Amazon is expanding its warehouses rapidly enough that those people have work to do despite the robots. Without this modernization Amazon would have needed to hire more workers, meaning this is still a net job loss.
Which is why China could go from $1.x trillion to $11.x trillion in GDP in just ~17 years, while the US - the world's largest economy - simultaneously still managed to add $8+ trillion to its GDP.
Global and local economic growth makes it possible to absorb slack labor. Which is why we have 7+ billion people on earth, while simultaneously the global median income has been rising for decades nearly non-stop, the global median living standard is at an all-time high, and famines are at an all-time low.
If it worked in any regard as a zero sum game, most of those people would be dead or never would have existed in the first place.
And even though those human jobs are standardized as much as possible, there are still inefficiencies in the system, many of which are (in my inexpert opinion) caused by the design of the bins and UI deficiencies in the stowing app. If Amazon really wants to improve employee efficiency, I think they could do well to invest more in their internal tools.
Shipping-center automation is going to move people out of rote jobs in the same way that farm automation sent a lot of workers off the land. From this story, it sounds as if the people working at Amazon shipping centers have found mildly more palatable jobs that could lead (with more training) to better paying careers in industrial operations, design, etc.
We can (and should!) argue about how fast "better" jobs are taking shape. We can explore ways of making that happen more systematically so that children of pallet stackers have a brighter future. But it's a dim world if we think rote labor like pallet stacking ought to be preserved as long as possible.
For a lot of parents, the possibility of their children having a secure full-time job is a lofty aspiration. Millions of Americans are trapped in cycles of unemployment or in low-wage jobs with no security and no benefits. Vast swathes of the US are blighted by long-term unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and a lack of inward investment.
Amazon aren't buying these robots out of some altruistic desire to lighten the burden of their workers. Their treatment of warehouse staff is notoriously dreadful. If Bezos could fire every single worker in his warehouses, I have absolutely no doubt that he would.
Better jobs would be great, but at the moment we just need jobs.
http://articles.mcall.com/2011-09-18/news/mc-allentown-amazo... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-devas...
Your on a PROGRAMMING forum and your advocating for doing things less efficiently just to keep people employed
Still, the U.S. economy has created about 12 million net new jobs since 2012. (BLS data.) The unemployment rate is at 4.3% now, down from about 8%. For people willing to hunt for something better, the hunt is getting easier.
However, the theme of this article seems to be "Automation came to Amazon and no jobs were lost, so don't worry about that pesky automation issue!", which seems blatantly misleading. While new jobs like robot maintenance will be created, I can imagine they will only be a small portion of the jobs that were replaced, and that is going to leave a lot of people unemployed and even potentially unemployable. That is an issue we certainly need to acknowledge and discuss.
That being said, I think this is all wonderful, in spite of the misleading framing.
Is that like someone losing a child because they decided never to have any?
Losing jobs due to lack of job growth concomitant with GDP growth (as is the case here - i.e. more efficiency, same job count) creates more inequality - a larger share of the value produced flows to capital. Depending on your politics, this is either a bad thing, or just a benign fact. But it is definitely a thing.
Massively false, in fact you've got it exactly backwards. See: very well recorded 50 years of industrial revolution era history.
The price of consumer goods, and the cost of producing them, dropped aggressively for decades during that time. It was not due to the lack of competition (demand not being met by another company); competition was the reason for it. Specifically, competition competes the margin away.
Input costs and end consumer prices would rise if the demand were being left unfilled by other companies (ie if the market were, for some reason, totally or partially devoid of competition), until competition arrived again. The lack of competition tends to inflate costs across the entire supply chain.
Nobody want to be drones. They are forced into being drones.
Simply keeping those jobs around, merely as an exchange of blood labor for basic living support, is not a mercy to the people you are trying to help. No, it is slaver's talk. It signals a greater failure of the social security network, or the dysfunction of redistribution of wealth to benefit the general public, that people cannot keep basic living standard without such compromise.
Well, I didn't append all the qualifiers I could have because I assumed that my comment would be read in a reasonable way.
Right now, those drone jobs are the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of people. I obviously want to see the eating problem solved before the drone job problem is solved. Until then, saying that these people should be happy to lose their drone jobs is cruel. I encourage you to go present your theory to some of those drones. Tell them about how they can cast off the chains of their slavery and be free to starve.
Talk about failures of the social safety net is nice (and I agree, as far as that goes), but it's just talk. Talk is not going to fix the social safety net. These are real lives that depend on this issue.
I think in this article's case, it is good automation, not the aggressive kind, so I want to know why people would lament over the loss of the those non-existed shitty jobs.
Second, even aside from attrition, there are absolutely people who would have wanted the jobs that the robots are doing. Some of those people would have wanted those jobs because it would have been their only option. I would rather they had other options (via a social safety net, presumably), but that's not the world we live in right now.
At this point, I suspect you are intentionally reading me in the worst sense you can manage. I think I have adequately explained my position, and if you really want to continue this discussion, I encourage you to go back and re-read my comments. Engage the statements I made or ask questions about the points you don't understand. Otherwise, have a good one.
If anything, this last election should have exposed this. There is a whole cohort of people out there that feel they've been slighted and left behind because of the shift in manufacturing. They feel like they should still be able to go in and be a drone and get paid well enough to raise a family.
I like efficiency. I think abundance is great. Our economic system ensures that those things will not help the great mass of people in our society.
Productivity is the root of economic surplus. It's the lodestone of the economy. If we stop increasing productivity, the pie stops growing. Productivity is the reason the poor today live better than a king or emperor of old.
Often ascribed to Milton Friedman, but it seems more likely to be William Aberhart originally.
If trickle-down economics ever worked, it certainly doesn't work now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/08/resea...
If that were actually true, why do the most productive economies nearly universally have the highest median incomes? That includes the US, which has nearly the world's highest median & disposable income levels. If it worked as you're implying, the US would have a terrible median income.
In fact, our economic system - and variations of free market economics broadly - is precisely the reason so many do so well. That's true in all developed nations on the planet, from the US to Canada to Scandinavian countries to Japan to Australia to Germany to Switzerland. To the extent a nation lacks such, is the extent to which they suffer poverty at the median vs developed nations.
Most of those same high median income nations that have taken aggressive advantage of free'ish market economics, are able to provide robust healthcare systems and social safety nets, precisely because of the glorious abundance the system makes possible.
Demand has been slack for a decade and economists are freaking out. What's going on? Why is civil society disintegrating? Why is the fascist right rising? Why are white people's life expectancy declining?
Neoliberal reforms (deregulation, private capital, sale of nationalized industries, etc) that were instituted in central america, south america, Russia, and others basically destroyed them. In particular, the wave of desperate people arriving at our borders are in significant part due to US support of neoliberal policy and the support of violent regimes in El Salvador, Guatamala, Chile, Argentina, and on and on.
You have to ask yourself, why are we facing problems now? We're the global superpower! Even more so, why are the economic maladies present throughout the western world at a time when we should be at the peak of our civilization? This was something that stumped me for a long time. Shouldn't problems be regional? How is it possible for Donald Trump, Brexit, Geert Wilders, and Marine le Penn to occur at the same time?
There's a systemic problem. Think about it.
Labour productivity growth has been very tepid since the 1970s, concurrent with an expansion of regulations and social spending.
To give just a couple of examples: the EPA and OSHA were both created in the early 1970s, and have had a documented negative impact on manufacturing productivity. The Empire State Building was built in 18 months. With today's regulations, that would be totally impossible.
This idea that the US saw a rise in neoliberalism in the 1970s is a myth. The opposite is true. Only at the international level is it true, with the market reforms of China, India and numerous other developing countries, and the international situation is looking better than it ever has, with average wages doubling over the last 20 years.
I can point out banking deregulation, airline deregulation, oil extraction deregulation.... it hasn't been a uniform march in a single direction, but there has been significant deregulation in core industries. One might point out that the construction industry is now safer, as in fewer people die per building. It's not really possible to justify any deaths for construction in reasonable circumstances.
The question is has a doubling of wages kept pace with the increase in wealth in those countries? I suspect 2x is far below the wealth that was produced. It would be helpful to discuss a particular example.
Computerisation provided a brief boost to labour productivity in the late the 1990s, but that quickly vanished. Labour productivity growth has been at/near century-long lows since the early 2000s, and from the early 1970s to mid 1990s.
I would dispute that we've seen an overall reduction in banking regulations. From what I've heard from those inside the financial industry, the costs of regulatory compliance have risen enormously. Less anecdotally, filing fees for initial public offerings have also increased significantly. All classic signs of rent-seeking.
And then there's KYC/AML/ATF regulations, that have seen enormous growth since the early 1970s, and especially since 911.
On top of all of this a new class of affirmative action type regulations and regulatory pressure that encourages banks to increase lending in particular neighbourhoods where disadvantaged groups are overrepresented has emerged over the last 40 years and steadily become more pervasive.
Beyond the financial sector, any broad measure of the scope of regulations shows that it has increased significantly since the 1970s, at rates far exceeding economic or population growth.
>It's not really possible to justify any deaths for construction in reasonable circumstances.
Numerous people die everyday from numerous causes. A more developed economy generally lowers the risk of death from many causes. So you can definitely justify voluntarily assumed risks in employment, that are associated with more workplace deaths, with a more rapid rate of construction specifically, and economic development generally.
But whether fewer regulations is desirable somewhat beside my point. My main point is that by no reasonable standard has the US become more 'neoliberal' (free market) economically.
>>The question is has a doubling of wages kept pace with the increase in wealth in those countries? I suspect 2x is far below the wealth that was produced.
Our primary concern should be increasing median wages and reducing poverty, not ensuring equally distributed gains. In any case, it's been pretty equally divided. One third of developing countries have seen income equality improve, one-third have seen it remain the same, and one third have seen it worsen.
The problem is you need a reason to give them money. If robots are more effective than human labor there is no reason to give them any money at all because they lack the education needed for more advanced jobs which also again requires money.
The only alternative to solve this problem is by letting them come to us and immigrate to a developed nation to send money back to their home country. Unfortunately Brexit has shown that this is not an accepted solution.
If someone asked your boss about your experience of your job, or someone a couple of levels above your boss (much of the article quoted "Dave Clark, the top executive in charge of operations at Amazon") and didn't ask you, how accurate a picture would they get? Can Amazon's (effective) COO really tell us what it's like to be a factory worker there?
In my experience of being in the position of the interviewer, as a consultant, the boss and even the immediate supervisor usually have little idea about their subordinates' actual work, challenges, frustrations, etc. Unless you ask the person doing the work, you really have no idea what's going on. A common experience: The boss says, 'the new system works great!'; the subordinate says, 'it's awful and I just have to work around it'. But I shouldn't have to talk about consulting fundamentals here; I thought that was a journalism fundamental too.
I don't know about Clark, but I'd imagine he has a rough idea, at least of the general state of affairs. The quote about wanting associates to have less monotonous jobs rings true- I've heard that notion before, and it's good to know that it comes from that high.
Without evidence, why do you believe it? If you were given that sales pitch about something core to your job, would you buy it at face value? If corporate actually cares, why isn't this issue taken as seriously as other Amazon projects? Wouldn't they be collecting data to evaluate the results? Why is there no regular, quality, anonymous objective survey of the warehouse employees?
For all I know, there is, but there's no evidence of it in the article (the NY Times dropped the ball on it too - and they are supposed to be the skeptical journalists). If not, how do I, the NYT reader and Amazon customer, know if it's not just feel-good stuff that eases hearts and minds not on the factory floor, but in the corporate offices and in the customers' homes.
I work at Amazon in operations, so I'm a little more able to answer than most, but to me it's just a warehouse. The buildings are built as huge boxes. The only thing I can think of is that they're brightly lit. There is an eye toward safety.
However, there is still a high degree of color-coordination, even when you're not looking at shots emphasizing the orderliness of the place with the colors brightened.
There are lots of very clear, systematic horizontal lines. Part of that is how all the equipment is the same, and those self-moving crates are all the exact same height, but they went to the trouble of painting the bottom of poles yellow and the rest white. When you do see red, it's all on the same horizontal line, too. The bottom of the self-moving crates are red, then nothing until you get the tops of the poles, which are all at the exact same height. If I didn't know anything about the company, say it was Walmart's warehouse, I'd expect it to look more like this: https://imgur.com/a/A8ALC
It's also worth considering that there may well be an intentional effort towards aesthetics. These are frequently hard and unglamorous jobs. If white poles and good lighting help make the place feel less oppressive, then I think we'd consider those merits.
Side note: I liked "self-moving crates". Those are Kiva robots carrying pods around. They're fascinating and oddly adorable.
Corporate wants to believe that we're trying to do right by them, by making their jobs easier where we can, and by being a decent company to work for. We supposedly pay a bit above average (certainly better than minimum wage), with benefits, and provide some other perks, at least for the full time associates. A lot of effort goes into making their jobs easier and more reliable. It's understood that these are, as I said, not fantastic jobs and most of them won't stay long term, and that's ok. Some move up into management.
The internet tells me that we drive people like mad, that management is brutal and unforgiving, that there's no such thing as full time associates, and even if there were, you'll never become one. I have seen some utterly grueling jobs in person. (The one I have in mind I believe has very short shift times and I think was meant to be automated this year.)
There is some variance where and when we employ FTEs and PTEs, and I think that's a lot of the difference. And the hard truth is that when we bring on more work for Q4, it's seasonal, and most of them will simply not be needed afterwards.
The internal tone could colorfully be described as a controlled panic, that we must scale our operations, faster every year, because Amazon is not slowing down, and we have to keep up. I don't doubt that this manifests itself as a scary downward pressure on the floor, especially during peak. It is understood that manpower alone is failing us and we will shortly be simply unable to hire enough people to meet demand. That we can barely do this now. Automation is crucial.
I suppose my view is: they work incredibly hard and we try to do right by them, and probably don't do enough. We occasionally make the news for the latest horror story, but I find it hard to believe it would ever be intentional. And I have serious doubts about our part time associates.
I can elaborate if you had a particular question in mind.
The kind of automation here doesn't seem actually much different from the 19th century when hand weavers were replaced by power looms. Except we're talking about warehousing and fulfillment instead of weaving thread. But same case of workers now moving from doing something themselves (weaving or stacking) to overseeing (multiple) machines doing the previous task faster. But this doesn't mean the old jobs required less skill; oftentimes automation actually REDUCES the required skill level.
...and so overall, more stuff is made. And this can reduce worker leverage (especially if combined with devaluing of skill... such as skilled spray booth technicians replaced with people tending automated spraying machines). And THIS is where the negative part comes from.
So we need some way to give leverage back to workers. Whether minimum wage, labor unions, tech cooperatives, etc.
Automation pays for the $15 or $20/hour minimum wage. $20 minimum wage also drives automation. If employment is maintained and innovation in automation continues, this is a virtuous cycle that COULD benefit everyone.
But there's also this: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
This is a really important statement. If you ever feel like your job is boring, unchallenging and repetitive, that is a sign that it could be done by a robot. Either you need to figure out how to automate it and get a promotion, or you're eventually going to be replaced and let go.
Eventually I started coding and building/modding PCs and became a TKD instructor and international FC fighter. I've since become an experienced SA and systems programmer.
Where is the alike progression to be found now?
[1] http://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2016/10/13/tech-secto...
Oh the sad irony.
At some point Amazon will start dropping jobs too.