[HN Gopher] Amazon burns through workers so quickly, they'll run...
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Amazon burns through workers so quickly, they'll run out of people
to employ
Author : Jerry2
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-06-17 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.yahoo.com)
| Traster wrote:
| Isn't this just.... inflation? Amazon is worth N Billion dollars,
| rent is expensive, food is expensive and workers are thinking
| that maybe working one of the worst jobs available to them isn't
| worth $15h.
| passivate wrote:
| What is the churn in other retail or warehouse jobs?
| crazygringo wrote:
| "They'll run out of people to employ" is pure clickbait nonsense.
|
| If they ever faced a labor shortage at _current_ wages, they 'd
| just _raise wages_. That 's how it works.
|
| But as they increase automation, they also might not even ever
| hit that shortage at current wages anyways.
|
| (None of this is a comment on working conditions and whether
| they're good or bad... just that the idea of "running out of
| people" is utterly silly.)
| yardie wrote:
| Many years ago (2000s), and between graduating HS and starting
| uni I took at a job at warehouse that paid $18/hr after training
| and certs, $13/hr to start. That place was a butchershop chewing
| through guys young and old. It was a vicious cycle of working
| there, workmens comp, and back again. And I met more than a few
| guys who treated the job as temporary with workmens comp as the
| career objective.
| codingwageslave wrote:
| As an Amazon employee, some of the software teams are absolutely
| horrific. Hire to fire, long hours, huge work load, lots of
| employees on visa worrier they will be fired at any time etc.
|
| On the other hand, really interesting high scale software
| problems, some really smart people, good teams
| brian_spiering wrote:
| That might be a big part of the business context behind the "We
| are going to be Earth's Best Employer..." statements in the 2020
| Letter to Shareholders.
| tyingq wrote:
| I found this update somewhat amusing:
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/update-on-our-vi...
|
| _" The first update I want to give you today is to a policy
| called Time off Task. If you're not familiar with it, this
| policy is a way to measure the amount of time employees are
| logged on to the software tools in their work area...Starting
| today, we're now averaging Time off Task over a longer period
| to ensure that there's more signal and less noise"_
|
| It's going to be a long road to "Earth's Best" if this sort of
| thing is the best they can do.
|
| Edit: Although not testing for marijuana anymore is actually
| noteworthy...I give them credit for that.
| awillen wrote:
| I don't know that they really deserve credit for not testing
| for marijuana. It increases their potential pool of hires and
| saves them money. Add to that the fact that a positive test
| for marijuana doesn't necessarily indicate that you would
| ever be in any way impaired on the job, and it feels more
| like a rational business move than a good social policy.
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree with all that, yet lots of places still test. So
| the "credit" I'm giving is for being somewhat early in the
| cycle.
| muttled wrote:
| A couple Google searches show that Amazon is the second largest
| employer with somewhere between 900k-1.3m employees depending on
| source, and an average tenure of one year. Completely back-of-
| the-napkin here, but seems like they'd burn through a million
| workers a year. Google also says we have ~10m unemployed people
| in the US. I would guess they could over-fish the labor pool at
| those numbers over a number of years.
| TN1ck wrote:
| Discussion of the same story but linked to a business insider
| article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524637
| tyingq wrote:
| They'll run out of people to employ who will accept X conditions
| for Y dollars, sure. Then they will have to adjust either X or Y.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Cynically, I think they will adjust neither, and instead adjust
| Z: the number of people they need to work in their warehouses.
|
| I'd be willing to bet that as they rely more on robots in their
| warehouses (sorry, "fulfillment centers") the _worse_ the
| conditions will be--because they will be less reliant on people
| choosing to work there, or being able to keep working without
| getting injured or otherwise forced to quit.
| [deleted]
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Or they bus people from even poorer regions there. That's
| what they do /did? In Poland or so, can't remember anymore.
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree they will do that when it's cheaper than people. It's
| unclear to me when that might be.
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(page generated 2021-06-17 23:02 UTC)