> Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times.
Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.
This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.
Bezos was invited to dinner with the Obamas at the White House, along with Jon Stewart. He was flapping his mouth off about his vision for us all being happy little worker drones.
Stewart told him that people want fulfilling, rewarding work they can be proud of, and that being errand boys for billionaires isn't fulfilling. Stewart capped it by saying that turning people into service drones for billionaires is how you end up with a revolution (ballsy words to say at a White House dinner to the richest guy on the planet.) And after a bit of silence, Obama said "I agree with Jon."
You'd think Bezos would take the words of the president of the united states a little more to heart, but it seems not.
And then years later, what happens? Staten Island union leaders thank Bezos for being too busy flying on his dick-rocket to stop them from unionizing his warehouse.
Bezos basically considers every other human to be a happy little servant, just dying to work for the 0.001%. He's exactly like the stereotypical 1800's British lord who looks down upon his servants and says "oh they enjoy a good hard day's work for someone else."
> So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
My wife is a Physiotherapist; when we lived closer to a fulfillment center it was deeply concerning just how many of her patients were seeing her for WCB (Worker's Compensation Board) claims resulting from injuries at the Amazon warehouse.
You'd think they'd scrap the commercials and put the budget into improving working conditions if they really cared. I doubt the cost of the ads, plus the cost of the bad publicity, plus the cost of employee churn is really worth it. Why not just do the right thing? Even if it made them sightly less profitable, so what?
"The leaked internal findings also serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."
"Amazon's attrition rates were 123 percent in 2019 before jumping to 159 percent in 2020, according to internal data in the report Recode obtained, while turnover rates across the US transportation and warehouse sectors were much lower: 46 percent and 59 percent respectively in 2019 and 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates."
1) Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable
2) He feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled
The two statements seem relatively disconnected (which makes the "and" a little confusing). Anyway, while I understand a) (not saying I agree) and am a little confused by b), how both or either would logically lead to your conclusion is not obvious to me. Can you elaborate?
That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding analysis.
I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if a job is a good or bad deal for them.
They have bills and payments that must be made or they will suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the political affiliation of the CEO.
Compare with an "up or out" system [1], which many companies have, as does the US Army.
When I was at Google, it was generally understood that you were expected to be promoted to senior engineer eventually, but I never knew how much it was enforced.
My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.
The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to cite when applying for other jobs.
Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.
Yeah, my first thought when I read the headline was “Oh shit, have Amazon figured out they can’t treat people like shit and not run out of people willing to work for them?”
Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can employ.
Beyond the "up or out" mentality, the disgust you got from considering people as replaceable cogs in a machine and how it's done overall, and maybe not applicable to warehouse forces ; I think having some turnover in your organization is a good thing. You don't get the same diversity of idea and experience when people around you have all been there for 15 years than you get when they're coming and going. In my experience people who have been around for a long time tend to drink the coolade much more, and are more complacent with stuff that shouldn't be.
Yes, Amazon actually pays employees $5000 if they quit and agree to never return. Available to any employee who has worked there for long enough (I believe a year?)
The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.
This is a retrospective. Priorities have changed, according to TFA
> But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021.
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location.
After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need.
It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.
1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr
2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr
Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
Amazon does a lot to optimize employee productivity. This has two corollaries:
1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.
This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).
When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
There's a big regional disparity problem with the FEDERAL minimum wage. There's no dollar amount you can pick that is both fair in high COL areas like SF, Seattle, New York (median home price over a million), and also feasible in low COL areas like rural Ohio or Mississippi (median home price around 100k).
If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.
> It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
Shows that a true minimum wage is not something the government can mandate. There is a natural minimum wage that the market determines. It depends on (at least) the nature of the work and the supply of potential employees. For warehouse work, it's apparently over 2x what the government says it should be.
The Fed is about to induce 3 years worth of rising unemployment by their own estimates, so the days of workers not needing to take crap jobs out of desperation will soon be at an end.
This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too
“We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him. In the meantime, Pagan should “do some GrubHub or Uber,” the HR employee said.
When the news broke that Amazon was doubling the salary of corporate employees I mentioned on here how it felt wrong in comparison to what they pay their warehouse workers and drivers and got some backlash on here. A lot of talk about how an engineer provides XXX% more value and supply and demand.
Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a decent wage and have decent work conditions.
I was getting daily recruiting emails on my personal emails, and recently they started sending recruiting emails to my work address. I obviously never signed up for anything with that one, so they must be sourcing them from very shady people somewhere.
The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.
“Running out of people to hire” is a strange way of saying “Not offering employees enough to want to work there”. To be catty, there are plenty of people to hire, but maybe they’re running out of people to exploit.
I've always wondered about this, at Amazon and also at Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc... They seem to burn through people quite fast. Won't they all just run out of people at some point, or will just increasing pay bring enough people back?
I would not work for Amazon unless my life depended on it (and even then I would have to think twice) but I have to say (reluctantly) that as a customer, both retail and AWS, I absolutely love them. The power that Amazon is acquiring scares the hell out of me, but at the same time, when I need to buy some random thing, no one else even comes close in terms of convenience and reliability. Sometimes I will make an effort to buy direct from a vendor, but more often than not the experience is so horrible that I go right back to Amazon.
Not surprised to see this pop up. I interviewed for a position with Amazon a few months back to lead up a new research program to determine how they can better recruit and retain hourly workers. I had no intention of taking the job, but was curious so I took the interview. What stood out was just the sheer scale at which they're operating - they're literally up against the constraints of domestic labor supply. I have plenty of strong opinions about how they treat their workers and have no desire to work for such a company, but I was surprised to find that I did sympathize with them to an extent - it's not just about offering better pay and bathroom breaks, they're also on the verge of exhausting the viable labor market. I wish whoever took the job the best of luck - I hope that they're taking the research effort seriously and it's not just performance art.
As many others have said, there's no shortage of labor in the US; there's a shortage of pay.
Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking.
Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy something online.
Amazon has 1.6 MILLION employees based on its last financial report, with 1.1 million in the US. Basically 1% of the US labor force currently works for Amazon.
They're really pushing the limits of their work force. I think slowing the pace down a smidge in the warehouse and not burning everyone out would really help them keep it sustainable.
> An HR manager told Pagan that there was nothing he could do about the termination but that Pagan should reapply for a job at the company in three months, per Amazon policy. “We would love you back in 90 days,” Pagan says the HR staff member told him.
>>“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024”
At what price point?
Offering what working conditions?
>> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better wages, and benefits?
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better rules that are not attempting to run employees like running machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't have to make a choice between making their performance numbers and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck?
These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How To Manage" work...
The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to your goal.
and how do they plan on bringing all of them? There are 85,000 new H1B visas in a given year, and they cannot be used for warehouse workers. The work visas are mainly for white collar jobs, and the only way then can bring a ton of foreign workers is from Amazon offices overseas, via the L-1 work visa, and that is not that easy since they need to maintain headcount to support the use of Amazon services in those countries.
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
Wow. Think about what this is really saying: Amazon adopts the explicit policy of not wanting their workers to stay on long enough to figure out that they are getting a bad deal.
So it's not that they are running out of people to hire, it's that they are running out of people who have not yet figured out that working for Amazon is a bad deal.
Now I understand why I've been seeing so many commercials lately about how great it is to work for Amazon.
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KennyBlanken|3 years ago|reply
Stewart told him that people want fulfilling, rewarding work they can be proud of, and that being errand boys for billionaires isn't fulfilling. Stewart capped it by saying that turning people into service drones for billionaires is how you end up with a revolution (ballsy words to say at a White House dinner to the richest guy on the planet.) And after a bit of silence, Obama said "I agree with Jon."
https://youtu.be/Vewz1v4rQYg?t=116
You'd think Bezos would take the words of the president of the united states a little more to heart, but it seems not.
And then years later, what happens? Staten Island union leaders thank Bezos for being too busy flying on his dick-rocket to stop them from unionizing his warehouse.
Bezos basically considers every other human to be a happy little servant, just dying to work for the 0.001%. He's exactly like the stereotypical 1800's British lord who looks down upon his servants and says "oh they enjoy a good hard day's work for someone else."
(print version: https://www.businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-jeff-bezos-econo...)
[+] [-] type0|3 years ago|reply
South Park had a realistic vision on how it is to work at Amazon Fulfillment Center https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc
[+] [-] dleslie|3 years ago|reply
My wife is a Physiotherapist; when we lived closer to a fulfillment center it was deeply concerning just how many of her patients were seeing her for WCB (Worker's Compensation Board) claims resulting from injuries at the Amazon warehouse.
[+] [-] eloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago|reply
"Amazon's attrition rates were 123 percent in 2019 before jumping to 159 percent in 2020, according to internal data in the report Recode obtained, while turnover rates across the US transportation and warehouse sectors were much lower: 46 percent and 59 percent respectively in 2019 and 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates."
[+] [-] jstummbillig|3 years ago|reply
1) Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable
2) He feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled
The two statements seem relatively disconnected (which makes the "and" a little confusing). Anyway, while I understand a) (not saying I agree) and am a little confused by b), how both or either would logically lead to your conclusion is not obvious to me. Can you elaborate?
[+] [-] 99_00|3 years ago|reply
That's not what it's "really saying". That's you adding analysis.
I think hourly workers are perfectly capable of figuring out if a job is a good or bad deal for them.
They have bills and payments that must be made or they will suffer real consequences. They aren't making employment decisions based on free soda, foosball tables, and the political affiliation of the CEO.
[+] [-] skybrian|3 years ago|reply
When I was at Google, it was generally understood that you were expected to be promoted to senior engineer eventually, but I never knew how much it was enforced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
My first job as a developer was with a big consulting firm. Undergraduate seniors were hired en masse every year as entry-level staff consultants. The expectation (not stated, but not hard to figure out) was that many would leave within a few years. Some would remain and get promoted, even fewer would stick around long enough to be considered for partnership.
The work hours were long (50 hour weeks normal, more was not unusual) but the pay was good and it was good experience to cite when applying for other jobs.
Amazon warehouse work is not a career. It's a job, that has minimal if any prerequisite skills other than being strong enough to move boxes around. It's not the sort of thing someone does for a lifetime.
[+] [-] jhugo|3 years ago|reply
Surely they stay on exactly long enough to figure that out. It is, after all, presumably why they leave.
[+] [-] Crosseye_Jack|3 years ago|reply
Hopefully it will lead to better treatment of those they can employ.
[+] [-] charles_f|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whimsicalism|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|3 years ago|reply
The early 20th century industrialists talked about all the same stuff. People are fickle and managing them at scale is hard. There's more to it than just "give them a good deal". There are plenty of people who are getting a "good deal" who become complacent or disgruntled.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
> But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cwkoss|3 years ago|reply
Is there a law like betteridge's law of headlines for commercials?
I.e. Anything a commercial tries to assert is probably untrue.
[+] [-] youessayyyaway|3 years ago|reply
>Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.
People used to work for Amazon warehouses in the 2010s because $15/hr was a much better wage than they could find elsewhere in their geographic location.
After the pandemic and ongoing inflation, it's not difficult to find easier work which pays better. Amazon responded with a token raise that doesn't even cover CoL adjustments, but history shows that they need to pay well above market rates to hire the quantity of people that they need.
It's funny to see this dynamic at a time when the federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25/hr.
[+] [-] FFRefresh|3 years ago|reply
This is a common type of formulation in journalism that often reveals the bias of the journalist.
1. Walmart pays SOME workers with PAST experience UP TO $25/hr
2. Amazon's average STARTING pay for NEW hires is $18/hr
Whatever one's opinion on Amazon, when you see the two statements next to each other, it's very obvious that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. Whatever the future of journalism/information-sharing, I hope we leave tactics like this behind, as it does not lead to improved shared understanding.
[+] [-] blagie|3 years ago|reply
1) Working for Amazon is no fun. For the same income, employees would prefer an employer where they have more time to relax and have less extreme workloads. If Amazon paid the same wage as a lazy cafe by the beach, guess where workers would prefer to go?
2) Worker productivity is higher, so Amazon can afford to pay more while being competitive with other businesses.
This is a pure economic point. I am not trying to make a veiled moral argument (although I understand how many such arguments could be read into what I wrote).
[+] [-] cameroncf|3 years ago|reply
When you read that quote carefully it doesn't say that Amazon employees get paid less. It's saying MAX pay at Walmart is $25/hr and MIN pay at Amazon is $18 an hour.
Apples and oranges. Meaningless clickbait.
[+] [-] drewcoo|3 years ago|reply
That's the whole point of the "leaked" information articles. Getting media outlets to publish whatever insiders told them, ideally verbatim.
[+] [-] burlesona|3 years ago|reply
If you want a fun thought experiment, what if minimum wage was tied to local cost of housing? In the Bay Area you might need minimum wage >= $50/hour to offset the prices caused by gross artificial housing scarcity. That would force a lot of businesses to close, and would push jobs out of to lower COL areas where the jobs are sorely needed. It would also punish the NIMBYs by taking away their dog walkers and hamburger joints, which might finally change the politics to actually permit affordable housing to be built.
[+] [-] brightball|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efitz|3 years ago|reply
Why? It just sounds to me that the federal minimum is age isn’t needed; employers will set the wages necessary to attract the employees that they need and are willing to pay for.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionian|3 years ago|reply
If we raise min wage then they'll just fire people to make up the cost, not sure it's going to help
[+] [-] alangibson|3 years ago|reply
https://qz.com/2178359/the-fed-predicts-3-years-of-rising-un...
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
The odds they won't find an excuse to reverse course within 3 years seems low.
They talked about reducing the balance sheet for almost a decade and barely made a dent before more than doubling it during the Pandemic.
I will be shocked if in 5 years the Fed's balance sheet isn't substantially higher than it is now.
[+] [-] no_wizard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pram|3 years ago|reply
lol this is just monstrous.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
Warehouse jobs are back breaking. I don't think they need to be paid as much as a software engineer, but they should be paid a decent wage and have decent work conditions.
[+] [-] gigel82|3 years ago|reply
The recruiter refused to tell me where they sourced my work email from, but she said she'll remove it from their database.
[+] [-] thenoblesunfish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|3 years ago|reply
They are running out of people to over exploit.
Big difference.
Amazon will find better compensation and a modest change to work culture and environment will bring them as many people as they need.
[+] [-] pvankessel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|3 years ago|reply
Like many others, Bezos built his business by exploiting a temporary condition: A virtually infinite supply of people willing to accept a horrible job for low pay. That condition no longer exists, but Bezos didn't realize it was unsustainable (it's unsustainable because if all workers are paid shit wages they can't afford to be customers). Or maybe he did realize it which is why he retired. In any case, now Amazon is panicking.
Good. When I think about this along with their other dick moves like pushing cheap Chinese counterfeit products, encouraging fake reviews, and stealing third-party product designs just because they can, I now check Amazon's competitors first when I buy something online.
[+] [-] fullshark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subsubzero|3 years ago|reply
> But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020
I can see business papers talking about Amazon's failure in this space in the next 5 years.
[+] [-] wollsmoth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otikik|3 years ago|reply
- tells drivers to pee in a bottle
Doesn’t compute
[+] [-] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
This is _madness_.
[+] [-] akagusu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|3 years ago|reply
At what price point?
Offering what working conditions?
>> "...the Amazon Way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else and churns through the equivalent of its entire front-line workforce year after year."
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and pay better wages, and benefits?
Perhaps they should stop doing business as usual and make better rules that are not attempting to run employees like running machines at 105% of redline for every shift, e.g., so they don't have to make a choice between making their performance numbers and urinating in a bottle in the delivery truck?
These are likely seen as crazy ideas, but perhaps they should get ahead of the curve and make an attractive place to work instead of trying to treat Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times as a "How To Manage" work...
The combination of arrogance and utter out-of-touch cluelessness of management/MBAs, thinking everything runs just on their numbers, never ceases to amaze. Just because you can optimize one or two numeric parameters does not mean you are getting closer to your goal.
[+] [-] LegitShady|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 22SAS|3 years ago|reply