Amazon burns through workers so quickly, they'll run out of people to employ | Hacker News Reader

Amazon burns through workers so quickly, they'll run out of people to employ

yahoo.com

81 pointsJerry225 comments

Many years ago (2000s), and between graduating HS and starting uni I took at a job at warehouse that paid $18/hr after training and certs, $13/hr to start. That place was a butchershop chewing through guys young and old. It was a vicious cycle of working there, workmens comp, and back again. And I met more than a few guys who treated the job as temporary with workmens comp as the career objective.

They'll run out of people to employ who will accept X conditions for Y dollars, sure. Then they will have to adjust either X or Y.

Cynically, I think they will adjust neither, and instead adjust Z: the number of people they need to work in their warehouses.

I'd be willing to bet that as they rely more on robots in their warehouses (sorry, "fulfillment centers") the worse the conditions will be--because they will be less reliant on people choosing to work there, or being able to keep working without getting injured or otherwise forced to quit.

Or they bus people from even poorer regions there. That's what they do /did? In Poland or so, can't remember anymore.

A very large, well known company used to be the ultimate place to work. Part time, decent wages, college paid, health insurance, and housing assistance.

As you can imagine, over the years, wages didn't rise, and benefits started disappearing. And so did the applicants.

Now every peak season they just bus people in directly from Mexico.

I agree they will do that when it's cheaper than people. It's unclear to me when that might be.

Internal documents show automated Amazon warehouses have higher injury rates - https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/29/21493752/amazon-warehouse...

Seems like they are concentrating more injuries on fewer people as more of the work is automated.

"They'll run out of people to employ" is pure clickbait nonsense.

If they ever faced a labor shortage at current wages, they'd just raise wages. That's how it works.

But as they increase automation, they also might not even ever hit that shortage at current wages anyways.

(None of this is a comment on working conditions and whether they're good or bad... just that the idea of "running out of people" is utterly silly.)

It's a bit more complicated than that. There's only a certain range that amazon can afford to pay. Sure if they raised their hourly rate to $50 or $100 and then $150 an hour they could keep convincing people to come back after they quit, but that's obviously not possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people that quit at $16/hr or $18/hr like the article says, who won't come back at $20 and wouldn't come back at $22 either. Pretty soon, Amazon might hit an upper limit where they can't reasonably raise their offer.

If a business is not willing to treat workers decently and can't afford to pay the going rate to attract and retain the talent they need to support their current activities, then they need to adjust said activities to fit within their financial capabilities.

The difference for workers between $16 an hour with micromanagement and $22 an hour with sane working conditions is massive. Amazon can treat workers with an ouce of dignity and a 40% pay bump, but they choose every day to have a terrible reputation.

>that's obviously not possible

Why not? It seems like you are assuming a certain ratio of labor to stuff shipped, and also what it is should be obvious to everyone. It isn't.

> Pretty soon, Amazon might hit an upper limit where they can't reasonably raise their offer.

I mean, then they'll either raise prices to pay for it, or spend money towards improving working conditions, or whatever they need to do.

But it's all extremely straightforward. There's zero evidence that Amazon is in some kind of unique position where they'll be unable to be profitable and have to go out of business, while Wal-Mart and Target succeed. To the contrary, Amazon's doing better than anyone else.

A couple Google searches show that Amazon is the second largest employer with somewhere between 900k-1.3m employees depending on source, and an average tenure of one year. Completely back-of-the-napkin here, but seems like they'd burn through a million workers a year. Google also says we have ~10m unemployed people in the US. I would guess they could over-fish the labor pool at those numbers over a number of years.

I wonder how many people won't work for Amazon [ever] because of privacy re: “Amazon knows everything I've ever bought or thought about buying. Zero chance I’m applying.” That's why I won't apply to Amazon. My shopping carts repeatedly make me look like a terrorist. I wonder if a significant number of people don't apply for similar reasons. If so, I wonder if Amazon has taken this into account. They may have even less people to employ than they think.

Isn't this just.... inflation? Amazon is worth N Billion dollars, rent is expensive, food is expensive and workers are thinking that maybe working one of the worst jobs available to them isn't worth $15h.

Discussion of the same story but linked to a business insider article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524637

Amazon is trying to automate the shit jobs as fast as they can. But robotics and AI are only advancing so fast.

That might be a big part of the business context behind the "We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer…" statements in the 2020 Letter to Shareholders.

I found this update somewhat amusing: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/update-on-our-vi...

"The first update I want to give you today is to a policy called Time off Task. If you’re not familiar with it, this policy is a way to measure the amount of time employees are logged on to the software tools in their work area...Starting today, we’re now averaging Time off Task over a longer period to ensure that there’s more signal and less noise"

It's going to be a long road to "Earth's Best" if this sort of thing is the best they can do.

Edit: Although not testing for marijuana anymore is actually noteworthy...I give them credit for that.

I don't know that they really deserve credit for not testing for marijuana. It increases their potential pool of hires and saves them money. Add to that the fact that a positive test for marijuana doesn't necessarily indicate that you would ever be in any way impaired on the job, and it feels more like a rational business move than a good social policy.

I agree with all that, yet lots of places still test. So the "credit" I'm giving is for being somewhat early in the cycle.

Worked at Amazon twice, once part-time for a year, the other full-time in-between jobs.

The metrics thing is interesting, and they've managed to put a number on pretty much everything, so they can adjust for conditions and the available pool of workers by just shifting numbers around.

Still surprised at injury statistics --- both places I worked at took safety quite seriously and I never felt that management ignored it or was unconcerned, quite the opposite --- the one change I would have made would have been having folks volunteer for operating the powered equipment, and only requiring folks to do it if there weren't enough volunteers.

Wrote up a bit on this on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...

The bottom line is every day in the world there's a certain amount of work which needs to be done, and we as a society need to work out who does it, for what compensation, and how we are going to handle the folks for whom there is no work. There's a bunch of sad science fiction on this:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

but not much reasoned discussion or policy-making. Capital continues to seek the lowest points for employment so as to maximize profit, and since folks want their 401Ks and investment portfolios to do well, most folks look the other way.

Similarly, it's hard for folks to complain about rents others are paying when a home is the biggest investment owned by most homeowners and rents are driven by real estate valuation.

What is the churn in other retail or warehouse jobs?

As an Amazon employee, some of the software teams are absolutely horrific. Hire to fire, long hours, huge work load, lots of employees on visa worrier they will be fired at any time etc.

On the other hand, really interesting high scale software problems, some really smart people, good teams

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