Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

[Eugene]

Source: Vox

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

Unions might not be the tech giant’s biggest labor threat.

By Jason Del Rey@DelRey Jun 17, 2022, 7:00am EDT

Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailer’s service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it.

Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted.

“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, which hasn’t previously been reported, says.

The report warned that Amazon’s labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022. Amazon’s internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like income levels and a household’s proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities; the pool does not include the entire US adult population.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. So they'll have to pay more to workers ... womp womp (nt)

[CurtEastPoint]

2. Yep. Logical step is to pay them what they're worth. And let them unionize.

[DBoon]

3. and start treating them as human beings

Maybe give them breaks, allow them time off, etc.

[AkFemDem]

4. The whole point of the article was that pay isn't the real issue

And that’s why increased pay hasn’t reduced worker problems. The issue is Amazons “worker productivity over everything else” philosophy which has led to miserable and untenable working conditions. Just throwing more money out isn’t going to resolve their woes or worker conditions.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. That's what the article speculates and I'm sure to some degree it's true

Improving working conditions and better pay go hand-in-hand.

I didn't mean to imply they don't need to do both ... although if you pay people $30/hr instead of $15/hr, they're gonna put up with more shit to make that money.

So it becomes a balancing act for them to some degree. Some of each will likely be necessary, I concur

But since this is a localized analysis specific to 'where they need workers', with parameters involving distance from facilities, etc? I'd argue that the most important factor in expanding the radius away from your facilities from which workers are willing to come and work (and thus the population of potential workers) ... is probably most directly tied to 'what are you paying me to commute that distance all the time'? With 'conditions' being a close second.

MHO.

[Binkie The Clown]

6. Chew 'em up. Spit 'em out. nt

[Ollie Garkie]

7. Everybody

I know who is under 40 and not college educated has done a stint at the local amazon warehouse. The turnover is insane. MBAs seem to not know math. You cannot always assume the potential labor pool is infinite