What Amazon Does to Poor Cities
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water.
I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.
I think a major difference you're overlooking is that in your late teens and early 20s, you can do pretty hard labor without much effect.
I'm only in my mid 30s now and when I do a hard day's physical labor, I feel it a lot more.
Someone in their 40s or 50s or 60s is going to have a much harder time doing that kind of stuff every day.
It doesn't paint the full picture to say this is a problem with Amazon or UPS or whatever...
The problem really seems to be lack of additional opportunity for people who are unable or unwilling (or not in good enough health) to perform hard labor.
The same kind of applies to other low-skilled minimum-wage jobs like food-service. There's not much opportunity, so you find mid-career people doing jobs that only require (and pay) at levels that are appropriate for highschool or college kids.
(Not criticizing your comment here just providing my own conclusion to your point)
One more thing. Often people's argument around these issues seems to end with: "it's better than no job at all". We can frame the issues in more constructive ways, don't you think? We should aim to find ways to adjust the system to better achieve the goals we want: innovative technology, fast delivery, fair pay, good benefits, subject to the complexities of the world.
I've done both. You may think picking and packing orders is less grueling, but it's not. Pick rate and pack rate expectations are high enough to ensure they're not. I'd take truckloading any day of the week.
I think questioning this idea is the whole point of the article. It's a job, but does the job pay enough to improve the lot of the individual worker? Maybe that isn't fully obvious to the worker because they're worried about no job at all, but if the city of the business and residence of the workers isn't collectively benefiting, then maybe that's a hint that low-skill jobs don't pay enough. (Or are on a questionable edge).
Finally, if a business sets up with a portion of its employees earning subsistence wage, it's competition to other businesses which are more willing to pay better wages. These conditions are a potential drag on the progress of civilization if that's the case.
How long should we have kept them unemployed to wait for a new high-paying business to show up?
But still it's not an area you want to move forward with no introspection.
Edit: If low-workers are paid such a low margin that they have no personal buffer for uncertainties such as automation in warehouses, then we also guarantee that the government ends up paying for that transition (or we get unrest and/or economic malaise). If they're paid a higher margin, the economy ends up more efficient at flexibility transitioning from changes like warehouses becoming fully automated. (because offset workers can make individual transition choices that that make local sense instead of trying to apply slowly responding gov't policy).
There are more people able to do that job that doesn't require much skill. Additionally, for any given job (especially high-skill jobs), it also much more likely for able and unwilling people to become willing than it is for willing and unable people to become able.
Even though many jobs might not be "grueling," at least in warehouses where the inventory tends to be lightweight, the repetition and requirement to meet rate will ensure that even relatively simple tasks can wear people out. Having to stand in one place for an entire shift, in the Kiva-enabled warehouses, can be more physically demanding on your lower back, knees and feet than the jobs that let you move around.
From my experience the managers at my warehouse are very open to moving people around to fill different roles if you request it. This is obviously anecdotal but from my experience people tend to want to stick to one specific job rather than move around.
Still, I don't think employees should have to ask at all - Amazon should regularly rotate their FC employees through various roles, even within a workday. Doing so would improve performance, attentiveness and morale across the board, reduce repetitive strain injuries, and give each employee an idea of how various roles interrelate.
I've worked plenty of menial jobs, and the ones that just killed me inside were the ones that had extremely strict rules that eliminated my agency as a human. Unloading bricks for landscaping work? Hard labor, but mentally fantastic and I was only judged on how hard the other workers thought I was working, which as a human is easy to pick up on socially. Working on a food assembly line where I was judged on my placement & speed of a repetitive physical action? Almost debilitating stress and exhaustion.
Combining menial work with piles of stress is what creates physically & psychologically draining work that a night of sleep wont recover you from.
In fact, I'm surprised that none of the comments here have yet mentioned what I see as the worst, and tangibly different aspect of Amazon warehouse work: the gamification of the tasks.
> blue bars on the scanner count down the amount of time they have left to complete the task
> the company constantly sends messages to workers’ scanners telling them to work faster
> without warning, Amazon changed the amount of time workers had to stow an item from six minutes to four minutes and 12 seconds
This sound absolutely terrible. This would make any normal task stressful. The randomized changes and constant oversight strike me as borderline abuse/interrogation techniques. And while the article doesn't dig into it, I assume this is driven by AMZL software systems, operating on a global scale (using all workers and all warehouses as inputs), with machine-learning algorithms constantly tweaking the timers and count-down bars, and possibly even suggesting to managers "hey, worker A has slowed down in the past 15 minutes, would you like to send this pre-written message X to A? Tap [Yes] [No]". This sort of thing might sound like a brilliant idea to some rockstar developer in Seattle, and to the data science team, and the management team signing off, when in reality it creates a Hunger Games race-to-the-bottom mentality in your actual workforce.
And this is materially different from how Stater Brothers across the street operates (or any other warehouse job), presumably.
Not knowing if your manager will give you 4 or 40 hours is stressful.
Amazon measures everything. Their incentive compensation plans should be rewarding employees that exceed quota with daily bonuses.
One-year of tenure should not be required to qualify for basic benefits.
In short, these employees need to unionize and collectively bargain.
I'm guessing you have never worked under the quota system. Guess what happens when one meets a quota? He or she gets a quota increased. Guess what happens when he or she no longer meets a new quota? He or she gets fired. In a quota based system the goal of every employee is to hit the quota on a nose
"Regression to the mean" occurs when there are no incentives for over-performers.
Lazy management will simply raise quota without assessing downside risk (higher turnover, more injury, more sick days).
Good management will constantly adjust a balanced quota using a gaussian distribution.
The job is mechanical, most of the grunts are temps and they don’t get sick days. You put you A team in a safer place, crank the volume and purge the rest.
If that's all you have to defend it with, then you have nothing to defend. People expect better of Amazon, as they should. The company turned the owner into the richest man on the planet; there is zero excuse for short changing the workers.
Sure. No problem. They'll just have no job. And you can continue to believe that.
> The company turned the owner into the richest man on the planet
Because of the value of his stock. NOT income from sales! Amazon does not have extra money from sales to raise wages with. Their retail business runs at a loss actually. Raising wages would make things even worse.
> there is zero excuse for short changing the workers.
That's not what short changing is. Short changing is not delivering what was promised.
There is no magic fairy that can go around giving people money, as you seem to think "just give them more money".
There's a reason we tell students to finish high school, and go to college or a trade school - to avoid these kinds of jobs.
You actually want to help them? Figure out how to give them more education. Complaining that Amazon is helping them, but "not enough" is worthless.
The value of the stock is supposed to be a reflection of the value of the company. If their retail business is worthwhile even if running at a loss, than they could run at a larger loss with the only downside being the company's value dropping.
>You actually want to help them? Figure out how to give them more education. Complaining that Amazon is helping them, but "not enough" is worthless.
Better education takes more tax money, something Amazon has spent their entire history trying to avoid paying. And how many of them need better education before the necessary jobs at the warehouses get better conditions?
Ahh yes, the old, "You must lick the boots of your corporate masters for seeing to bless you with a few crumbs!" argument. It has never, ever held water.
"Amazon does not have extra money from sales to raise wages with."
That is a complete and utter lie.
"Their retail business runs at a loss actually. Raising wages would make things even worse."
The business as a whole, which is built on top of the retail business, is quite profitable. Them deciding to run retail at a loss does not change things.
"That's not what short changing is"
Yes, it is.
"There is no magic fairy that can go around giving people money, as you seem to think "just give them more money"."
Nobody is asking for a "magic fairy." They're pointing out that it's extremely unconscionable that the richest man in the world cannot afford to pay his workers a living wage.
"There's a reason we tell students to finish high school, and go to college or a trade school - to avoid these kinds of jobs."
And the people who don't have much choice should just go to hell? Seriously, what is it with this idea that people who weren't able to get an education, for whatever reason, don't deserve to be treated with dignity and respect?
What you describe is accurate, we use to get entire trucks of "Total Gym" boxes that weighed 70+ lbs each. Turn over was high and there was accountability similar to what I read in this article but with two key differences. Hourly workers at UPS were unionized and the carrot at the end of the stick seemed much more realistic as numerous guys were promoted to supervisors and drivers who could make 6 figures. I was promoted to my part time supervisor role after a couple of months in fact.
From the disposable contractor workforce engineered to prevent unionization, to the Taylorist micromanagement to the lousy pay, its a nasty business. Walmart seems like a benevolent force in comparison.
It’s not better than no job at all. It’s a race to the bottom that is putting people out of work and hurting the wretches working for them.
In me this inspires a high-level of cynicism. Now when I hear a startup wanting to "change the world" I'm always curious whose underpaid labor is going to subsidize that change. Underneath all the Silicon Valley virtue signalling about improving the state of mankind you see the same gears and levers of labor exploitation as old-school sweatshop manufacturers like Nike.
And make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to make the "knowledge workers" at these companies just as expendable.
Really, I'm just upset about my own disillusionment. As a little kid I thought Silicon Valley was going to usher in a new era of technology and plenty. Something like Star Trek's utopian ideal of a society where scarcity is a thing of the past.
What I see instead is the same old corporate bullshit of maximum exploitation for maximum profit.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/walmart-warehouse-workers...
Even someone poor has a magic device in his pocket that can show almost any video ever, can talk to anyone, and give directions.
People today have never been better off. A poor person today lives better than a king of old.
Except that people always compare to each other. And that's never going to change.
That is an illusion to help people with their conscience. It does sound nice, but ...
The poor maybe eat better and maybe have better shelter, and certainly access to cleaner water, but they have significantly less control over their destiny. Also, kings didn't have to work and they were (usually) extremely wealthy, had servants, and could do whatever they wanted to. Kings had people to help them raise their children. Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable medical condition. Kings usually didn't get evicted for not paying rent on time. Kings didn't get arrested for trivial things and have to spend time in jail because they couldn't afford a lawyer. I could go on and on.
They certainly did die from what we would today call easily treatable conditions. Antibiotics? Vaccines? Appendicitis?
>Kings also didn't die from an easily treatable but ultimately unaffordable medical condition.
Kings died too, man!
Worse, they died from medical conditions which could be survived with no treatment, because treatments with negative utility based on lore with no scientific basis were applied which the common folk would not have access to.
This is dangerous bullshit. A poor person who spends their life working long hours on menial work where they have no agency is not better off than medieval nobility just because they have cheap entertainment available.
A lot of "poor people" stress about providing enough food for their families or losing their homes. Not something that nobility ever had to worry about.
A lot of people today live better than medieval kings; you and I probably do. But our society does a shitty job of distributing the bounties of technological miracles, except in superficial ways.
This isn't about technology. Sure, it's being used to make something "look" new. But in the end, its trying to undermine governmental regulations to make an extra buck. Ignore these regulations cause we're a "tech company", and you profit.
There will be a reckoning again, regarding these "sharing" and "tech" companies. And after the courts' dust clears, those companies will sink.
Edit: Ok Downvoters, I'd love to hear why I'm wrong. I'm all for building new and innovative things. But much of "tech" is just shoving the costs of society on the poorest in favor of "innovation".
Four decades ago, analogous jobs (manual labor, no college degree) were in the car industry: at Ford and GM. Those jobs were good middle-class jobs with good salaries. On those jobs, one could raise a family with a 40 hour work week, and do very well working 50-60 hours a week.
Today, the similar jobs are in Amazon warehouses. What is different? A big one is that we have removed worker protections from our economy. By going to an unregulated free market, now Jeff Bezos is a multi-billionaire and his workers are living in near-poverty.
You can regulate all you want, but it would be better to focus on getting as much of the population ahead of the curve as possible as opposed to leaving them behind. At the end of the day, we just don't need secretaries, travel agents, much of the automobile assembly workers, etc.
We keep telling ourselves that, but it's a story. (Presumably so we can feel good about income inequality)
A good secretary, or a good travel agent, are amazing. I'd pay good money to have either one available, and so would many other people.
All we've done is put that work on people who already have another job, the people who used to be customers of that secretary/travel agent. In the process introducing a middle man who makes money off redistributing work. Yes, that middle man is slightly more efficient - but it can only be more efficient because the hard parts of the work are outsourced to you.
The difficult part of booking travel isn't making a flight reservation, it's finding just the right thing. A travel agent was a tremendous help there - you're now doing that yourself. Expedia, Orbitz, etc. are completely useless in that department.
You usually end up on tickets with very restrictive conditions which cannot be modified other than via the travel agent themselves, often for more money than a less restrictive ticket could be bought directly with the airline. If you are many time zones away and can forsee irregular operations there is no way to pre-empt them until the agency has staff available. In addition, many loyalty programmes (particularly for hotels) do not allow you to accrue or make use of benefits if booked via a third party.
That said, for vacations with a lot of co-ordination involved (think family trips with people coming from different origin points, different dates etc) a travel agent can be useful and worth accepting the more restrictive nature of what can be booked.
But yes, your wider point holds: Travel agents aren't well suited for some kinds of travel. That, I'd argue, is more the business model than an inherent problem with travel agents.
If there was somebody whom you could tell "A to B, next week, one of these three carriers, cheapest price, here's my calendar, buy in my name" and you'd pay them a $20 commission to just make that happen, would you still decline a travel agent?
There's a shortage of labor but employers don't seem to be willing to pay more to incentivize more people to enter the workforce (which is partially reflected in the so called "shadow" unemployment rate, which is higher). An increase in the minimum wage will cause one of two things to happen, both net good IMO: either employers to invest more in capital / automation or cause them to give all current and new employees a raise.
Or more cynically: fire employees and do more with the remaining employees.
In fact a tech oriented PE firm that buys these businesses out, makes technology investments to improve productivity or eliminate easily automatable labor and then use the savings to scale the business further. (Which would result in net more employment.) I predict we'll see more of these in the coming years.
Also many auto manufacturing jobs were actually pretty skilled, so replacing the workers wasn't as easy.
I think a living wage is important and ideally Amazon could pay a decent wage plus benefits. That said, I absolutely hate the argument you made and it makes me cringe every time I hear it. It's apples and oranges. There is a world of difference between building an entire company that is one of the largest in the entire world and sorting boxes in a warehouse. We can argue that people should be paid more for humane reasons and that the multiple for CEO compensation vs. workers should be lowered, but Bezos' wealth is based on something completely different than this. I think a case for basic income is getting stronger because the more companies are asked to pay for human labor the more likely they are to do away with it and have it completely automated. What then?
That those jobs aren't reserved for a subset of the population (mostly white males).
Also, I think you're thinking more like 5-6 decades ago, the US car industry wasn't doing so hot in 1978.
1. Amazon could build a brand around treating workers better (UPS has at times had this reputation) and thus differentiate themselves and justify the cost of better pay and benefits.
2. Government regulations could require a certain standard of job creation or insurance coverage. These could be coupled with incentive programs.
3. Workers can organize. (i.e. into unions)
4. Consumers can vote with their dollars.
5. Investors can vote with their dollars.
There are many more variations on these themes.
If these kinds of solutions don't work, workers tend to get squeezed. Due to the complexities of our economic and political systems, in practice, certain companies end up treating human resources (people) as expendable assets to exploit. Sometimes they do so for a long time. That is why other power centers (government, labor organization, consumer activism, investor activism) are necessary to achieve broader goals.
Consider the effect of (2), (3), and (4) upon the worker at the margin: they will all constrict the number of jobs relative to what it is today. Great for the lucky fewer who get in, but the economist must consider both the seen (higher wages for some) and the unseen (unemployment for others).
As to (1), Amazon is at the Walmart end of the market and are driving up affordability; the two go hand-in-hand. Does sufficient demand for a Target or Costco exist?
An anecdote, for what it’s worth: the people I knew who drove their trucks several years ago had the opposite view of how they were treated, particularly about being chronically shortchanged on retirement contributions, leave balances, and other accounting matters. Maybe things have changed since then.
Amazon will respond to this threat by telling agitated investors to calm down because they have a plan to automate every human out of existence by the year 2025.
Unsophisticated investors are appeased by the tasty kool aid.
Sometimes the general public will drink it too and react with downvotes thrown at the people hinting that the emperor might not be wearing any clothes.
I would bet serious money that one of the hallmarks of the next presidential election is regulation of big tech. The backlash is building. That wave will have some mainstream politicians calling to break up big tech.
Uber's sexual harassmentpalooza together with Twitter and Facebook's arrogant performances at their respective Congressional hearings did most of the work.
I view it from this lens: journalists have both a professional code and a desire to have people read what they write. As a result, many journalists want to surprise and even shock people. It doesn't mean what they write is pleasant or what you want to read.
There are many other factors in play. For example, cities across the US are scrambling to offer (quite dubious, in my opinion) incentives to Amazon. I really value different perspectives that show the kinds of jobs that Amazon creates.
Lastly, I read your last sentence as getting it backwards. It is precisely because of noise that we have to focus on what matters. What you call noise may be someone else's signal. Noise makes it harder to sort through information, that's nothing new. Asking for less journalism in order to get less noise seems backwards. Journalism, to the degree to which it investigates, analyzes, interviews, helps offer different ways of viewing the world. To do so is hardly what I would call noise; rather, good journalism shows researched, sometimes novel perspectives on reality.
For every single one, I contacted customer support and complained. As performance got worse, I actually got on the phone.
* The first time I was comped a month of prime. $8.
* The second time I was comped $20 in Amazon credit, and they reshipped the package ($55 in goods). I was told if the other one showed up, to keep both. The other one showed up the next week.
* Third time I was comped a month of prime ($8) and package was reshipped. This was $160 in electronics. I was told if the other showed up, to keep both. The second one showed up 2 weeks later.
* The fourth time I called I asked why I was paying for prime. After 10 minutes, the rep agreed. They refunded my entire year of prime ($100).
* Fifth time they didn't care. They admitted their performance was awful, and were confused how their logistics operation was doing so poorly, but if I didn't like the service I should go elsewhere.
To their credit, I was compensated $351 for five failures in five weeks, all of which were not in peak season (this was 60 days in advance of Holiday shopping season).
What I mean is, there isn't some sort of ethical slow-lane when I go to checkout on amazon.com, right? There _is_ slow, free (non-prime) shipping, but anecdotally, that's not serviced via a separate pipeline anymore. I don't _mind_ waiting 5-8 days, I don't _complain_ about the shipping delays. But choosing free shipping also isn't any sort of boon to social justice.
I could certainly just stop shopping from amazon.com, and buy locally (though still from big box stores, often, since that's locally the only options left). But I don't harbor illusions that my conscientious abstention will register on Bezos' balance sheets.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a fix. Certainly not an obvious one, nor easy. As the article discusses, cities _need_ the business, at least for the initial few years. And people _need_ jobs. Structurally, though, what are we as simultaneously consumers, citizens (voters), and people in the workforce going to do? The article discusses attempts to unionize. It discusses cities' attempts to lure Amazon business. It discusses what hard-working people with families do, and think, about the situation on the ground. It even gives responses from Amazon PR. The solutions are subtle, hard to enact, and slow to take effect.
They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway.
At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying double their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.
I'm sure all those other warehouses love how Amazon is training up so many employees that can be poached at will.
> Wages start at $26 an hour, but many workers make a lot more than that because Stater Brothers operates an incentive program in which people who grab orders—doing similar tasks to workers at Amazon—are rewarded if they go faster than the average speed.
I wonder if it would be possible for a group of workers to pay another group of workers to slow down, thus lowering the average speed so that the first group ends up in the rewards group without having to raise their speed?
Then they enter into optimization mode, and each level of management needs to show better numbers on their reports, so they have two routes, suck value out of the product or suck value out of the work force.
Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?
That makes complete sense. /s It sounds like where you were was a city without jobs.
> San Bernardino is just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same question: Is any new job a good job?
Yes, if you don't have a job then any job is a good job. Sentiments like this article is why people are "too good to work for McDonalds."
> The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in 2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4 in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived.
Something that can't be attributed to rising inflation? These are meaningless stats.
I didn't read the rest.
Sure, but probably a very particular type of inflation: housing cost. Wages for unskilled labor haven't increased at a rate to account for rising housing costs, exacerbated further by insufficient housing supply, and demand for housing has gone up due the increased number of jobs.
Median household income in San Bernardino is 39k/yr (pretax) [1]. Median rent is 16k/yr [2]. So the median household spends nearly 42% of their pretax income on housing. The other necessary expenses of life (especially if you are far below median income and have dependents) will quickly eat through the rest.
There is a dynamic at play in which several factors, including the increase in lower paid jobs and population, is increasing poverty rates.
[1] http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/california/san_bernar...
[2] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa...
EDIT: found a more conservative median rent citation and updated the figures based on that.
It's not like worker are going to politically unite and retaliate. All (both) the political parties are controlled by 1%. Any popular movement is either squashed (Bernie) or appropriated (Trump) by this moneyed elite. Unions too are successfully stigmatized and restricted legislatively ("right to work").
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And I'm pretty sure that the people who do it for their job, if they aren't able to find another one, would miss it.
Automation can be good, but we can't forget that these are actual people, with rent payments, food bills, and possibly families, that are currently doing these jobs. Blindly following the "Automation is great" mantra, while forgetting about them, is going to be disastrous.