Amazon executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ | Hacker News Reader

Amazon executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ

businessinsider.com

127 pointskirykl143 comments

If you recall a few years ago, Amazon raised wages to a $15 an hour and some said that this wasn't a move made out of altruism like they claimed, but instead due to the work conditions of their warehouses. In the last few months other large firms have offered wages in excess of $15 per hour, the Wal-Mart local to me has huge banners all over the store offering $17.75 for example. It appears that those who doubted the largesse of Amazon have been proven right. Amazon is probably going to need to move to $20-$25 given how demanding they are.

HEB (Texas grocery chain rated among the top in the country) here is advertising warehouse jobs at 17.50

I think the real loser here ends up being restaurants wondering why they can't get people for 2.15+tips

Good.

That's a bad comparison though. Warehouse work is hard hard work, much harder than being a server. It's also a matter of where these warehouses are.

Back when I was in college I took a job as a stock clerk at Publix, I got paid more than some supervisors ($12/hr in 2015), but my god was that the hardest job I've ever had. You're basically lifting for 6-8hrs straight.

At some restaurants you’d be worse off but those tips add up. Presuming you get 15% all you’d need to do is $100 served in an hour to catch up. Obviously there are fast and slow times but at a reasonably busy place you’re probably coming out ahead. Not to mention servers collect most of that tax free when they shouldn’t.

I heard a report on NPR a few weeks ago where they were lamenting how much servers make and we’re basing their data on reported income to the IRS. Hah.

>Not to mention servers collect most of that tax free when they shouldn’t.

I believe servers get taxed at a certain rate regardless of if they actually make the tip. It's assumed they will make $x in tips so they are taxed for $x regardless of if they made that or not. They get hosed on both sides (employers and government).

I worked in the restaurant industry for a decade. People like to point to waitstaff having it rough but on a typical night they take home considerably more than the back of the house as well as pay little to no tax on cash tips. There is no special tax that I'm aware of to prevent that tax evasion.

In an area where basic retail wages ~$10/hr with some experience, my no wife with no experience was netting $15-20+/hr after tips. This is despite her scumbag employer making her work an hour before and after service prepping and cleaning the dining area.

I was working 2x 20hr/week jobs and making less than her working a Fri/Sat/Sun..

Yup! My family owns a restaurant, and I can confirm this is true in my area (northeast US). My sister worked as a server for a summer (2017, or thereabouts), and averaged about $46 an hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it helped that she was young, attractive, and witty. When I served, I made about $30 per hour (not-unattractive male). Sex sells, as she used to quip- it's true, there's also a gender-based component to it.

Anyway, most of that in principle was cash tips. She was young enough where she was getting all of her tax back anyway, but I do know many people who underreport the tips they receive.

That may be true but things are very very unpredictable right now (and will be for a while).

People are not willing (apparently) to give up a sure-thing like high-paying fulfillment work or enhanced unemployment benefits in exchange for an unstable position like making $2/hr and hoping patrons throw money at them.

Restaurants have to pay $15-$20 an hour to have a consistent and reliable workforce in the current market.

I think this upward pressure in wages may also be a reaction to unemployment benefits paying out at a better rate than usual. You can't just pay at parity with unemployment to entice people on unemployment to work for you. It's not a new minimum wage, but if federal unemployment is of the opinion that you should be getting paid around $15 an hour and will put its money where its mouth is, then you as an employer need to accommodate for that. (To clarify I think this is a good thing)

Anecdata: At a McDonalds in an urban center in Colorado they're offering minimum 17.25.

Current unemployment rate is at 5.8% as of last month. Down from nearly 15% during the pandemic. I've read it's because the pandemic forced people to look for other jobs (like call centers) and they are actually better off. I'm sure it's a multitude of things.

Ultimately, it's inflation. Despite bogus numbers that make it look low (driven by cheap foreign-made consumer goods) the cost of the things people can't avoid paying for (housing, health care) keeps shooting up. People can't continue to work for low wages and keep paying the bills.

Megacorps like Amazon can whine as much as they want that they're "running out" of employees, but the solution is obvious: just raise wages. Once big employers like Amazon start feeling this squeeze enough, they'll start passing the costs on to consumers, and eventually even those Chinese imports will start becoming more expensive. Once that happens, it becomes impossible to pretend that inflation is not real.

Have you heard of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share though? There is no law that all wage change is accounted for in productivity change and inflation.

Plus, recall Keynesian feedback loops that more wages will unlock more consumption -> more wages. So increasing the wage share can even make the rich better off, unless the rich cruely only care about their power relative to the poor.

No mention of basic economics in the article? It's rarely a case of "running out", merely the economics of supply and demand. If supply is low and demand is high, expect the price to rise. In this case, that means that if you don't pay the price, you can expect to lose (or continue losing) the workers. In other words, it sounds to me that they aren't offering the pay and conditions the market requires.

The interesting wrinkle is that they seem to need to source unusually energetic and resilient people, and instead they're hiring at some lower bar and having enormous turnover.

It's an unusual twist on clearing the market - arguably they ought to raise wages, not so much to retain people by paying them enough that they stick it out in hell a bit longer, but so they can clear the market for people able to tolerate and thrive in the working conditions.

Yea, it is shitty back breaking work where you are micromanaged a ton. They could either raise the pay or they could stop pushing their workers to be miserable machines so much to make the work more tolerable. I hope they do both.

This is by far the best news I've heard about Amazon warehouses. It's so incredibly awesome that there might be something that Amazon can't lobby against that could force them to be more nice to their employees.

Preach. I did warehouse work years back in my teens, trundling around with a pallet truck picking orders was moderately enjoyable but it was inherently obvious that if the management had 'raised the temperature' by micromanaging us or demanding more output it would have become horrible.

Another thing that was apparent was that some people were just better order-pickers than me. One part of my post above was kinda wondering how Amazon would do if they kept the demanding work, but paid enough to recruit (and treated well enough to retain) physical outliers, a bunch of warehouse athletes.

I've visited a car factory, a well-run Japanese marque, where it was mentioned that they had very high initial turnover - some people just couldn't take the pace of the production line - but high longer-term retention. In a sense they must be doing something right.

Normally I would consider this hyperbole, but I am actually worried they will try to legislate some sort of indentured servitude in the guise of something else.

I would not put it past them or the lawmakers.

Yow. Amazon prisons, maybe?

Local governments tying up benefits to working at an Amazon warehouse.

I really shouldn't be giving out ideas like these.

Pushing for more immigration?

>It's an unusual twist on clearing the market

From my experience in the retail/restaurant/hotel businesses, it is a usual twist. It just gets articles about it because it is Amazon and it lands clicks.

These are jobs known to have a lot of turnover and the employers make no effort to reduce turnover, from a combination of their customers opting for cheaper prices at competing businesses with high turnover and employers having (historically) the upper hand in the supply/demand equation for that type labor.

That's a great point - what's true for Amazon workers is just as true for waiters etc. But Amazon is big enough in absolute terms that they could maybe reach some better equilibrium if one exists, plus they're under a lot of scrutiny.

Humans aren't a fungible resource. When Amazon fires a worker, or that worker quits because of poor conditions, it's going to be significantly more difficult to convince that person to come back. Amazon sets up its warehouses in low-cost areas where fewer people live. I can certainly imagine that they could run out of people. How many times can you source a 350k person workforce before you exhaust the local supply of willing laborers? Not that many, I imagine.

How many people enter the workforce annually?

Workers are renewable for annual exploitation

This comment is so bleak it made me think of Amazon going the route of the US military and recruiting in high schools

It's what tech companies already try to do recruiting fresh out of college and promoting their specific tech in highschool curriculia as well as just hoping to pad the future workforce. Not that different than the military and its ROTC programs in highschools.

Obviously, working at Amazon as an SDE or whatever isn't quite the same as signing up for the military but the recruitment strategy isn't all that different.

The tech industry is grooming people for a highly paying kind of job. That is much less problematic (maybe even not a problem at all) than grooming people for a low paying high demanding job.

Tech boot camps!

Workers don't enter the market naive. Every viral shitting-in-a-bag story is another generation of kids with an aversion to Amazon

I don’t think people are totally naive, but naïveté is a spectrum and youth tend to have higher levels until age and experience occur.

This is why the army uses young men for combat and why apprenticeships in trades work exist. To exploit young people

Which ends up being a problem for young people who know and are trying not to be exploited. There's enough capable but uninformed people out there that it's no problem to these companies that they're missing a portion of the pool of potential employees by paying nothing or very little.

so, once amazon provides the ideological glorification, personal fulfillment, and material rewards those other careers can offer to at least a fraction of their members, they will perhaps be able to reliably exploit newcomers.

soldiers can at least be promoted. apprentices may eventually become journeymen. both provide skills training that enable you to become an independent contractor, and the higher tiers offer quite decent pay.

but for now everyone knows amazon is just a dehumanizing dead-end survival-wage job that will wreck your body, and the executives know everybody knows this, thus tfa

Not true, at least in restaurant industry, people rage quit (because horrible condition or whatever) all the time, yet some time latter they show up again at work at the same place, same pay, same position.

Coupled with increase pay incentives, yeah they will come back.

If you've worked there before and they'll rehire you, it may be an easy option for people when they quit or get fired for some other job.

If they were fired for not hitting metrics and not for misconduct, they're probably willing to rehire.

> If they were fired for not hitting metrics and not for misconduct, they're probably willing to rehire.

My understanding is that "hitting metrics" in these warehouses is so exhausting that most people can't do it indefinitely.

Sure, which is why there's no reason not to rehire that person after a while.

> How many times can you source a 350k person workforce before you exhaust the local supply of willing laborers? Not that many, I imagine.

IIRC, there are quite a few people who work at these Amazon warehouses who are essentially nomadic (e.g. living out of camper or van), but I don't it's enough to really change that equation.

Honestly, the next step Amazon needs to do is get serfdom legalized. Then they could purchase a fief in these areas and require a customary amount of labor from each household per year.

That sounds homeless rather then nomadic.

From my limited contacts with the Czech Amazon, people do return to work there. Mostly because Amazon is almost certain to take them back, unless bridges were thoroughly burnt. (I.e. stealing.)

If you treat your workers badly enough so that they never return at any salary, doesn't that mean you can run out of that resource?

They're not running out of people to employ, their product (working in an Amazon warehouse) sucks, the market knows it, and Amazon is stuck with the excess inventory. If they want to solve the problem, they can improve product/market fit.

Or just go "full robots"

It seems pretty clear that they're trying to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics#Acquisition_by...

But I guess thus far they've found that just burning through human labour is more cost effective. Perhaps upgrades to labour conditions/wages via unionization, regulation, etc would change that calculus.

You say that like it's a choice to be made and not a project that remains permanently 5 years away.

Many warehouses or portions of warehouses (for retailers that deal in a much narrower range of products than amazon) are already fully automated. These are usually in slightly higher "marginal cost of sending the wrong stuff" industries.

For some manufacturing facilities the robots pick all the parts and then the humans take the "shipment" of parts to the actual line and distribute it to the relevant stations.

And that works well if you have a small number of SKUs with a set weight and dimensions. Amazon has billions of SKUs.

The robotics and ML needed to be able to open a storage bin, see what items are inside, choose the one you are looking for- and only it- and then carefully pull it out without disturbing the other items, that is the problem Amazon faces with full automation.

You could reduce the number of SKUs per bin, but then you have a storage problem- there's way more SKUs than bins in a building. You could go slower, but then you have a throughput problem.

It's really, really hard. And while humans have a high opex, they're really good at that particular problem. Hands and eyes are incredible tools. Robotics is catching up though, and it's awesome, but it's not there yet.

Source: I spent many years working in Amazon Fulfillment Tech (and these opinions are my own and do not represent me speaking for the company).

Maybe Jeff can succeed where Elon failed. I have doubts.

There are a bunch of things they can do:

* raise wages

* change job conditions

* build better filters for who they hire

Right now, you can apply for a job at Amazon through a Web form and get a response back in 15 min. An algorithm, some parts of it powered by ML, is probably doing that. And it's probably creating false negatives. Look at who it's rejecting, and improve the algorithm.

I'm not sure that it's possible to do too much filtering on who you hire when you're hiring a half-million people in a single year.

They should just make a smartwatch app for their application process. Detect a pulse? Hired!

Filtering would help turnover. There’s no reason why hiring half a million a year isn’t enough. It means there’s a problem with the company, not the job pool.

If workers are overworked because the workload is too large, filtering prospective hires more could make turnover worse. Many hands make light work.

I think your last sentence is the key to Amazon's problem. They have the money; they just don't want to spend it.

Filtering would help only if the wages are suitably high enough to make similar jobs less attractive. The Fulfillment Center work is reportedly harder than other work that pays the same or better. If the wages are higher, it would be worth working harder for Amazon and staying. That's how a healthy labor market works.

I think you're right, and have those in the correct order of precedence.

- 60%: raise wages

- 30%: better working conditions

- 10%: better filters (with the two items above a prerequisite)

I'm under the assumption they are doing everything they can to figure out how to automate the whole warehouse before they run out of people. if not, perhaps a Union can save them by creating an environment where workers aren't driven like some beast working a field. The reality is that is there main advantage, working people close to death. Walmart looks like a great place when you consider how AMZN treats their employees.

Some beast working a field would be treated quite well. If you’re a subsistence farmer who relies on an animal for ploughing and it gets injured because you drive it too hard, you’re totally screwed.

And yet...people bought new horses after doing this, regularly.

Not the subsistence ones

Actual substance farming doesn’t get to use beasts of burden.

Farmers need trade with an outside source to get new horses after the old one dies. However, a farm at break even can be paying for needed supplies like horses, which is in effect subsistence farming because there is no long term surplus.

That's the point, they're treated as a locus of labour power and nothing more. Workers are hired solely to drain as much labour power from them as possible, a condition of which is obviously giving them the rudimentary means of reproduction. Keep in mind your argument applies equally to chattel slaves, in fact even more so: for they were owneed, whereas Amazon merely rents its labour, and in case of ill-health can easily replace them. I don't think slaves were, by any meaningful standard, 'treated quite well' - and neither do I think most Amazon workers are.

No, my point is that this analogy conveys something other than what the author intended to convey.

That Amazon doesn't work its employees to the literal point of death, only up to the point at which they are unable to continue to work? There are many gradations of suffering and torment up to that limit, that are more than sufficient to wreck someone's life.

No, that farmers don’t work their animals to the point that they’re unable to work.

I don't know if you're being deliberately obtuse, because that's exactly what I said in my last comment. I'm arguing that 'not exploiting a sentient being under one's control to the point of death' is a low standard consistent with all kinds of terrors.

I'm assuming you weren't just randomly throwing your comment into the cybervoid. The person to whom you responded said that Amazon employees might prefer a company where 'workers aren't driven like some beast working a field' - implying that they are treated as such at Amazon. You suggested that beasts aren't treated so badly by their masters, which following the analogy, suggests that Amazon workers aren't treated so badly. I'm countering that suggestion.

I’m making a point about the parent’s use of the analogy, not yours.

Immediately reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_(Animal_Farm) , the horse in Orwell's analogy for Stalinism.

They bought kiva robotics years ago

I've heard Walmart warehouses are also incredibly bad to work in. They are just less adept at scaling micromanagement well. I'm sure they absolutely would push workers harder if they knew how. Their management is just as soulless as Amazon's.

This was happening even with Software Developers and System Engineers back in ~2005.

They go around nickel and diming everything with their employees, topgrading everyone on 360 performance reviews and then have offsites where they tightly clutch their pearls over how they just can't understand why retaining talent is so hard. Unless you're lucky enough to get hired into a group which is highly thought of, it can be a really bad place to work, even if you're getting paid a lot.

Someone really needs to buy each of the Amazon executive team one of those "the only consistent feature of all your dissatisfying relationships is you" coffee mugs.

Exactly. I am unemployed (watching kiddos until the pandemic ends and schools open), and I wouldn't even CONSIDER Amazon despite getting dozens of recruitment e-mails from them a year.

It's always the same with these companies-- they "can't find enough talent" but the recruiters glad-hand the candidates but the interviews are tough and arbitrary. If you get/take the job-- stacked ranking will burn you out and fire you when you have children, a health problem, family problem etc, or dare age, or stand up for yourself.

Develop exoskeletons to lessen the wear and tear on the human body. Provide nice noise cancelling headphones and a pleasant environment with plants and fresh air and good light.

Augment people rather than trying to replace them.

I love the optimism. isn't it exhausting thinking like this, though? They couldn't care less about the poor folks in the warehouses. I've seen some of that stuff, it's completely horrifying.

Jeff is getting fat, stepping back, and going to space. I don't think he's gonna spruce the place up and put free cokes in the fridge anytime soon.

Hah, you make it sound as if the idea of exoskeletons was for altruist reasons. I think it very well can be a profit based decision. How much can a person lift, walk, etc in 8 hours a day?. With an Exo they could do it maybe 1.5 times faster, which would mean a 50% gain in performance. With a low enough price per Exo, it can make economic sense.

Sourcing and training new people all the time just can't be cheaper than better working conditions.

I don't get it.

Here's the explanation: the titular "executive" is a "former Amazon manager who oversaw human-resources efforts".

I would add that having to pay hiring bonuses for people to not stick around after only a few days is also a red flag regarding extremely degrading working conditions.

It's not difficult to train someone to tape a box or pull an item off a shelf. It would take a slow learner 10 or 15 minutes.

Might be the working conditions.

shocked pikachu face

I suspect they are demanding more physical stamina out of workers than they can safely sustain.

It is about growth. When you hire 10 people and 10 people leave you still hired 10 people and this looks very good on company presentations. Also they usually hire young people who have no idea how much they worth. And no experience means lower pay. It works so well in a lot of companies.

Pretty sure that Amazon is not a company that needs to use tricks like that to look good on paper. Considering their current growth.

It makes managers look good on paper.

The job inherently requires moving a bunch of items around and packing them, some of which are quite heavy. I don't think there's any way around that short of eliminating it entirely through automation or similar. (Also, I've seen suggestions that other warehouses are actually worse and Amazon just gets disproportionate focus from the media for the usual political reasons...)

Amazon has invested an insane amount of money into the recruiting/interviewing/hiring process. It has always been the Amazon mindset that workers are replaceable, and they have built their entire business on the operational model of hiring quickly, draining people of all their productive output, firing them (or pushing them so hard they quit on their own), and quickly hiring people to replace them.

When you have that mindset and investment in those areas, and especially when talking about positions that require relatively little training investment, I wouldn't be surprised if it is cheaper.

I think Amazon is reaching a point where the incoming pipeline of workers is drying up, though, and Amazon execs are apparently clueless on what to do next. It's really a situation where Amazon squeezed its workforce so hard in search of short term results, and now is reaping the long term results of a workforce that hates the company. Ironic, since one of Amazon's precious leadership principles is specifically to not do that.

All of this also applies to the corporate workforce, too, btw. There's an insane amount of attrition right now and nobody qualified wants to work at Amazon, even with the 200k+ offered salaries. It's not just a money issue, but a reputation/culture issue, and Amazon organizationally doesn't know how to solve those types of issues.

When supply dries up, prices go up. So what's cheaper in the short term may cost them in the longer term. Building ill will, too, can be very expensive over time.

Yep - I've ignored the many many Amazon recruiting emails I have received over the years. I have absolutely no desire to deal with their shitty employment practices and idc if it is "team dependent". I am not taking that risk.

Recently left a company with an ex-Amazon Director who was VP of Engineering. He was an absolute snake who had only really worked at Amazon for his entire career. He did his expected round of firings/PIPs at the 2 year mark, then quit himself. Many experienced engineers left around the same time since we all were tired of the shitty Amazon culture he was breeding.

The point is that now you have to watch out for who the Directory/VPs are at your current organization. If they bring in someone from Amazon expect the company culture to go downhill fast.

They have high turnover across the board. Another reason they don't do the typical 25%/year stock vest. 5% vests each of the first 2 years, with a catch up at year 3.

Low wage jobs typically have high turnover rates. It is why unions are established, so that people can see these jobs as lifelong careers and places where you need to be committed with a membership.

Plus unions increase quality of the trade.

The equity strategy is used at least among software engineers.

I am still surprised that they didn't buy Boston Dynamics. I would have been all over that. Perhaps they know something I do not.

Can they already do order picking?

Same, I don't understand it. Also still surprised that Google sold them.

A non-trivial amount of Boston Dynamics' funding came from DoD. Pretty sure Google was not interested in sustaining those contracts but without them it was likely a net loss.

Google knew that going in. Even if it hadn't been public knowledge (it was), it would have come out during due diligence.

There has to be a different reason, we just can't tell what it is.

My assumption is that the tech makes good videos, but is basically limited in what it can do, without someone always offscreen handling the controls.

if they automatize too fast then people will call for UBI... that's my guess

I think UBI is further off than you think. Look at how Andrew Yang was treated during the presidential election. Boomers and their rotten ways of thinking need to die off from positions of power first.

Main arguments I saw (from the left, at least) against Yang's UBI proposals were how he planned to gut social programs to pay for it. I think there will definitely be more discussions about UBI in the US political sphere in the coming years.

UBI is often viewed on the right as a cost neutral way of spreading social Security spending around so that Bill Gates, the unemployed and the permanently disabled all get the same $290 check in the mail every month.

The upside being lower spending on things like testing eligibility, the downside being that either the cost balloons to about $4-6 trillion a year or you basically just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

> just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

Their arguments against unemployment benefits are instructive. I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate, doubly so since it cannot be sustained by income taxes on a shrunken labor base, necessitating more taxes on robot companies.

>I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate

I can't help but wonder sometimes if that isn't the point for some people.

A raised minimum wage has the potential to become expensive. Pipe dreams, meanwhile, are free.

Many social programs in theory could afford to be gutted if we just stopped checking for, certifying, and auditing eligibility and started paying people directly with fewer questions. To what extent and how the transition would work out remains to be seen.

Yang was treated terribly because he's an outsider and not part of the establishment. See also Bernie, Trump, Tulsi. The GOP, DNC and corporate media were all against them during the primaries.

Amazon’s demand for warehouse picking and packing is highly seasonal, centered around the American holiday season. I think they do have robots, but it’s still cheaper to hire seasonal humans rather than have a bunch of expensive robots idle for 8 months of the year.

One of those dystopian facts that makes me feel some kinda way.

Is it more or less dystopian than fewer humans being needed due to robots being cheaper?

Maybe more? I believe the issue with the human race reaching the singularity point isn’t the world post singularity, but the transition period leading up to it.

Ideally, robots doing all of our work should be utopian, leaving humans free to pursue other interests. Unfortunately, the current structure of society instead makes this dystopian.

That's where we are going with Capitalism. In 500 years when we had improved robotics to the point of being able to do most of human work (excepting maybe knowledge work), it will be cheaper to buy a robot than to hire a human.

With more than 20 billion people at that time (the USA could have 850 million ppl), the only way for people to survive will be through hyper-efficient production processes and equalitarian distribution policies.

4 months full usage, 1 month maintenance, 5 months of Amazon Rental Robots.

modern day Biorobots

Why? Amazon already has significant automation in their warehouses and Boston Dynamics has yet to find a significant market for thier products.

They bought a warehouse robot company Kiva Systems in 2012. They have lots of robots.

Yeah, that was a smart acquisition. They have hundreds of thousands of robots working for them now [0]. The Kiva Systems founders were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame last year [1].

It's interesting to read in [1] that one of the founders is working with RightHand Robotics [2] on picking. I wonder if RHH would be another acquisition target for Amazon if they solve that problem.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics

[1] - https://www.therobotreport.com/kiva-systems-creators-inducte...

[2] - https://www.righthandrobotics.com/

Boston Dynamics builds thinly disguised military robots that are meant to be very flexible and can operate in rough terrain (for 15 min or whatever until the battery runs out, but that's another story). They're hugely expensive literal overkill for a highly predictable and controlled environment like a warehouse, which is why the Kiva robots that Amazon actually uses are basically boxes on wheels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE

They have some demos and robots that are literally designed for warehouse work.

Clearly they need a seasonal workers visa program like what farmers have. There are many people south of the boarder who are not afraid of a hard days work. Something must be done about this unskilled labor shortage. /sarc

I’m one of those tech people that wouldn’t work at Amazon no matter how much they paid me. Friends that did appear to be suffering PTSD many years later.

I'd rather they keep them out and raise either pay or quality of life instead. Quality of life hasn't risen with productivity increases in decades.

Just another day in our dystopian Present. The insanity.

Usually "we are running out of people to employ" translates to "we are not willing to pay fair wages to our workers". It is just baseless whining.

Its the same nonsense you hear from fruit growers. "We can't find anyone to hire so we need the government to issue more temporary visas for foreign workers" (New Zealand)

They'll try anything except offer a fair labour price

X shortage is another way of saying the price of X is too low.

The agreeableness of that statement is directly porportional to how much sympathy you have for the buyer.

"all those CEOs complaining about a worker shortage are just cheapskates not willing to pay more!"

"all those millennials complaining about a housing shortage are just cheapskates not willing to pay more!"

>"all those millennials complaining about a housing shortage are just cheapskates not willing to pay more!"

Or because boomers are preventing construction because it would lower their property value.

The equivalent to that for worker shortage would be "the government paying people (unemployment) to stay at home, in some cases more than what they'd make if they had a job".

Looks like new people quit right away.

I wonder if they have a ramp up time to allow their new associates body's to adapt to the very physical demands of the job. Same as you don´ t start hiking 20 miles a day, you need to start small and let your body adapt over a few weeks.

They don’t. My friend weighs North of 300 pounds. He dropped 25 of it his first month working at Amazon in the warehouse.

Maybe they should advertise that as a feature. "Two days of Package Gym per month included in your Prime membership"

The executives should definitely look at this for inspiration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNxvUrWQ_Q

Short of further machine automation, I wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon start promoting fitness programs in public middle- and high-schools: more gyms, lifting, running, etc.

"Welcome to the new national Amazon gym program! Upon completion and after graduation, you'll have a guaranteed interview and job opportunity waiting for you at Amazon!"

Leverage all the existing tax payer subsidized time, staff, materials in public schools. Furnish a few facilities with new equipment for publicity and image. They could even rustle up a few scholarships in a national competition to get kids interested and it would be a nominal fee for a physically fit workforce ready to sprint around warehouses and urinate/defecate in small containers.

Is this any different than any other business? What's the turnover at McDonald's?

According to this, up to the same 150% rate: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/29/fast-food-restaurants-in-ame...

They’ll deploy a new AWS service that enables cloud-based reproduction. Features may include provisioning (remote insemination), managed service accounts (OB/GYN), and deep learning RBAC (child-rearing).

Can’t wait!

I want some stats on how this breaks down. Are 50% staying a year and 50% a few weeks? Or do they burn out most people pretty quickly?

The problem would be solved overnight if the gov allowed short term serfdom contracts.

Hence why it doesn't.

It’s hard to read this article without pre-conceptions about Amazon. For some reason this made me think of North Korea, what happens when you kill enough people that you have no one left?

Maybe if they stopped their hire-to-fire strategy?

That was for software developers not warehouse employees.

Similar problem eventually. I'm an SDE in the Seattle area, I won't work for Amazon specifically because of the hire-to-fire practices. I saw that at MS back in the day I don't need to put myself through that... Generally speaking I get at least 2-5 contacts a month on linkedin trying to hire for amazon.

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