As Amazon warehouse employees have unionized and fought for better wages and working conditions, they’ve also increasingly watched their coworkers on the line become robots. According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, the e-commerce giant has officially deployed more than one million robots in warehouse facilities and fulfillment centers. By contrast, the company currently employs more than 1.56 million humans, the majority of whom work in the same facilities.
Thus far, Amazon’s robots have been more a part of the workflow rather than full-blown people replacers—though a report last month indicated the company is starting to tool around with humanoid bots for things like deliveries. But the company is certainly cutting back on human labor all while it cranks up its “productivity.” Per WSJ, Amazon is down to 670 people per facility, the lowest figure it’s been in nearly two decades. Meanwhile, about 75% of deliveries are now reportedly touched at some point by bots, and the number of packages shipped per employee in a facility has increased from 175 in 2015 to 3,870.
You’d think, in theory, that the embrace of robotics would make life better for employees, who should see the burden placed on them lessened as automation steps in to help with the heavy lifting. That has not exactly manifested in any of the data avaialble. A study conducted by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development found that 41% of Amazon warehouse workers have suffered an injury on the job and nearly seven in 10 have taken unpaid time off to recover. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also found that Amazon facilities regularly fail to keep workers safe and expose them to high-risk conditions.
Rather than relieving warehouse workers of their stress, it seems the long-term plan is instead to simply relieve them of duty. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a letter to employees talking up the integration of AI and automation throughout the company’s workforce and said the company will ultimately “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.” Instead of improving the conditions and quality of work, it seems Amazon will simply remove people from them entirely—as well as from their payroll.
In addition to the humanoid bots that the company is playing with, WSJ reported that Amazon is testing a number of different bots in its innovation labs, including integrating AI into the machines so they can do things like respond to voice commands. Who will still have a voice for them to listen to? To be determined.
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