Robots Can’t End Amazon’s Labor Woes Because They Don’t Have Hands
The holidays should be a celebratory season for Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Instead, the company is facing conflict and tragedy over the work done inside its distribution centers, the massive warehouses where the logistics of holiday package delivery are executed with machine-like precision.
About 30 equipment techs at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware are on the verge of unionizing, a first for the company in the U.S., according to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek. Earlier this month, at an Amazon-owned facility in New Jersey, a temp employed by a staffing firm was fatally crushed. And just this week in Germany, more than 1,000 warehouse workers walked off the job to protest wages and working conditions. “The workers are treated more as robots than humans,” German labor organizer Markus Hoffmann-Achenbach told The New York Times.
Although that was clearly meant as an indictment of Amazon, it’s an accurate description of work inside a warehouse. This is particularly true in retail, where merchandise makes money when in motion and costs money when at rest. Amazon in particular makes big promises about how quickly it can deliver orders, but for any company with inventory, greater efficiency in getting stuff out the door means greater profit potential. To that end, the goal in warehouse work is to get humans to behave as much like robots as possible.
Full Story: Wired