Amazon has installed new robots in its facilities that can pack hundreds of objects per hour and has considered rolling the technology out across its factories. The robots can wrap packages inside boxes it custom-assembles to fit each item. While the robots cost over a million dollars each, Amazon expects to recover the costs within two years.
A new report(Opens in a new window) claims that Amazon has considered rolling out the machines at dozens of warehouses, removing an estimated 24 positions with each rollout. Reuters notes that Amazon is interested in cutting humans out of the warehouse process altogether to save on labor costs, but that the task of picking items out of bins remains too difficult for robots to perform in a cost and time effective manner.
Amazon has a tricky path to navigate here, as Reuters(Opens in a new window) notes, between positioning itself as a potent employer -- one towns are often glad to woo, since Amazon warehouse jobs can be relatively high-paying -- and the back-breaking impact of the work. Stories about the physical difficulty of working at Amazon, its extensive use of temp agencies, the punishing schedule company employees are expected to work, and the limited help available to employees who are injured on the job have exploded in recent years, as Amazon warehouses have become more common.
“We are piloting this new technology with the goal of increasing safety, speeding up delivery times and adding efficiency across our network,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. “We expect the efficiency savings will be re-invested in new services for customers, where new jobs will continue to be created.”
Amazon has said that it won't fire workers to replace them with robots. Instead, it simply won't hire more workers as robots come online, and intends to transition workers who already perform these roles into other jobs. The machines, which are built by the Italian firm CMC Srl, can pack 600-700 packages per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human. The idea of transitioning workers into different roles as opposed to replacing them is one of the ways that automation can transform employment without annihilating jobs, or can even create employment opportunities in other ways. If robots are deployed in factories, for example, this creates work in robot repair that didn't previously exist.
This does not mean, however, that fears of the danger mass automation could pose to conventional employment is without merit. Over the past 50 years, American society was transformed as high-paying, blue-collar, unionized jobs were replaced by low-paying, non-unionized service work. Real wages for those in the middle-income quintile have scarcely budged(Opens in a new window) in 40 years. The number of people on disability rolls has exploded(Opens in a new window), in part due to the greater physical toll factory labor takes on the human body compared with office work, and in part because, when a factory closes and lays off workers in their mid-50s, the overwhelming majority of those people are not going to secure jobs as entry-level programmers. The job retraining programs launched and championed(Opens in a new window) by the United States over the past 40 years were not effective(Opens in a new window) in eliminating or even substantially reducing the problems they were intended to address. Where worker retraining has been effective, it has tended to be in specific markets or situations that haven't mapped well to the entire country.
A 2016 report(Opens in a new window) on the success rate of these programs released by the Department of Labor found that the "availability of WIA-funded training did not increase earnings or employment in the 15 months after random assignment." There was some weak evidence for improvements in these trends at the very end of the 15 month period that might become more apparent in a longer study; a 30-month study was said to be underway in the 15-month evaluation. But regardless, the data on how helpful existing worker training programs are all points in the same direction: They aren't. The reasons why range from the specific social and geographic conditions in each individual training center to broader issues that work against the concept. Three issues, in particular, stand out:- People who need training may not be aware the opportunity exists or may not qualify for it.
- Available courses may not match the needs of local employers.
- Simply retraining people to perform a different job does not require an employer interested in that job to offer an acceptable wage.
There are myriad other factors that can impact the success of these programs as well. Spending on job retraining has fallen for years, and these programs may be intrinsically (if inadvertently) designed to better suit the needs of white-collar workers as opposed to blue-collar ones. It's a complex topic you can spend a literal lifetime studying, but given the impact automation is expected to have on the workforce over the coming decades, it's going to be something we have to address. Even if you don't believe the estimates that 40-50 percent of jobs could be replaced by automation, it doesn't take a 40-50 percent job replacement rate to upend an economy or society. We're still grappling with the long-term impact of the loss of high-paying blue-collar jobs from decades ago, and that affected a significantly smaller percentage of the total working population.
In short, Amazon's decision to deploy superhuman packing robots is both a logical extension of our decades-long shift to automation and a symptom of future problems on the horizon when we haven't dealt super-well with the problems automation has created already -- not from the perspective of maintaining overall class mobility and providing a path into the middle class, anyway. Amazon is neither solely responsible for the problem nor its solution, but we're going to need better solutions than we've fielded to date if experts are correct about the scope of the disruption headed our way.
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