Amazon now deploys more than 1 million robots in its warehouses, company officials boast, but this doesn’t make life easier for its workforce. Instead, it increases the exploitation of the 1.2 million workers employed worldwide in Amazon’s distribution centers through speedup, reaping bigger profits for the bosses.
Different types of robots, large and small, roam the floors of Amazon’s vast fulfillment centers. They move shelves of products and pluck off items to be shipped, taking them to the workers’ stations. All this so workers have to work more quickly to pick out and pack those products needed to fill orders.
This has led to a staggering increase in the work sucked out of workers at Amazon. The number of packages shipped per employee each year in the U.S. has ballooned since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175, the Wall Street Journal reports. Three-quarters of the company’s global deliveries are now assisted in some way by robots.
This has allowed Amazon bosses to cut back the size of its workforce — more than 27,000 jobs were eliminated in 2022 and 2023 — and they’re looking to cut more as the speedup continues to grow. This puts ever more of a squeeze on those still working there.
The average number of employees per facility dropped to roughly 670 last year, the lowest in the past 16 years.
Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the U.S. Its rapidly expanding use of robots is being imitated by an increasing number of other factory bosses, who hope to make similar jumps in productivity — and profits.
Its bosses falsely claim that their use of robots makes workers’ jobs easier, replacing menial, repetitive work lifting, pulling and sorting with more pleasant assignments, like managing the robots. But this is not how it works out in real life. A handful of workers get promotions, but the big majority are stuck standing in one place grabbing ever-larger numbers of products more quickly while trying to keep up with the robots.
This comes at the cost of workers’ health and safety on the job. Amazon’s warehouses have one of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses in the U.S., with 4.7 cases recorded per 100 workers in 2023. The national average for warehouses was 2.4 cases per 100 workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Not surprisingly, the turnover rate at these warehouses is high.
Speedup higher yet at new facilities
The company opened its showcase 3-million-square-foot distribution center in Shreveport, Louisiana, last December. There, more than six dozen robotic arms sort, stack and consolidate millions of items. Other robots transport carts filled with packages for workers to pack, which are then moved again for loading onto trucks. Through new artificial intelligence software, robotic arms can identify objects based on color, shape and size.
But there’s still one big catch. These robots aren’t able to pick through bins to find individual items customers have ordered. That’s something workers must do. “The tactile grasp that the human hand has, and the situational awareness and the perception of the human brain, is unmatched,” Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told the Journal with regret.
Amazon is also rolling out its new “DeepFleet” AI model to coordinate the movement of its robots within its fulfillment centers, to further speed up processing. The company is also testing AI-powered “humanoid” robots, built with legs, arms and a head and designed to mimic a worker’s movements. Similar creatures are being prepared for use later this year at factories owned by Tesla.
Meanwhile, Walmart, which employs 1.6 million workers in the U.S., is competing with Amazon in deploying robotics, though not quite yet on the same scale. It’s also speeding up productivity by warehouse workers on the job while cutting the workforce. Worldwide, Walmart’s workforce is almost 70,000 smaller than five years ago.
“What was a three-four hour process to fulfill an order now happens in a building like this in less than 30 minutes,” Kieran Shanahan, chief operating officer at Walmart US, boasted to the Financial Times, referring to the company’s new e-commerce fulfillment warehouse outside Dallas.
Technological advances like the use of robots should improve workers’ conditions on the job, including a reduction of hours with no cut in pay. But under the lash of the capitalist rulers’ drive for profit, they make things worse for workers. To reverse this will take a fight by the working class to take political power into our own hands and use it to eliminate the horrors of capitalism once and for all.