Signs Amazon fulfillment centers are struggling to find workers: Recruitment ads now dangle the prospect of cool/cushy jobs to prospective warehouse workers. I spotted this Amazon warehouse recruitment ad on LinkedIn, which was likely shown to me because my profile mentions Amazon FBA:
The training benefit is on top of perks added years ago, such as healthcare on day one, college tuition benefits, and higher pay.
I visited an Amazon fulfillment center (aka Amazon warehouse) in 2019. It was fascinating to see one of the world’s best logistics operations in action. However, the signs on the walls belied a culture built on metrics-driven performance and hollow-sounding slogans about “customer obsession.”
It’s also a brutally hard place to work. This report was carried on CBS News:
“According to a national study from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED), 41% of the e-commerce giant’s workers have gotten hurt on the job. Of those employees, 69% had to take unpaid time off to recover from pain or exhaustion in the past month, researchers found.”
The full report (“The Injury Machine: How Amazon’s Production System Hurts Workers”) can be found here. Citing OSHA data, it concluded:
the injury rate at Amazon facilities increased by 20 percent between 2020 and 2021. After relaxing some of its discipline systems in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon reimplemented its monitoring systems and production pressures in late 2020, and its injury rates rose substantially. In 2021, Amazon employed one-third of all warehouse workers in the U.S., but it was responsible for nearly one-half (49 percent) of all injuries in the warehouse industry.
Automation can only go so far. At the end of the day, logistics requires human beings to do a lot of the heavy lifting. If you don’t treat your people right, they’ll burn out or leave, no matter what perks are offered.