Inside Amazon's Warehouses: Thousands of Senior Citizens and the Occasional Robot Mishap (wired.com)

Amazon aggressively recruited thousands of retirees living in mobile homes to migrate to Amazon's warehouses for seasonal work, according to a story shared by nightcats. Wired reports:From a hiring perspective, the RVers were a dream labor force. They showed up on demand and dispersed just before Christmas in what the company cheerfully called a "taillight parade." They asked for little in the way of benefits or protections. And though warehouse jobs were physically taxing -- not an obvious fit for older bodies -- recruiters came to see CamperForce workers' maturity as an asset. These were diligent, responsible employees. Their attendance rates were excellent. "We've had folks in their eighties who do a phenomenal job for us," noted Kelly Calmes, a CamperForce representative, in one online recruiting seminar... In a company presentation, one slide read, "Jeff Bezos has predicted that, by the year 2020, one out of every four workampers in the United States will have worked for Amazon."
The article is adapted from a new book called "Nomadland," which also describes seniors in mobile homes being recruited for sugar beet harvesting and jobs at an Iowa amusement park, as well as work as campground hosts at various national parks. Many of them "could no longer afford traditional housing," especially after the financial downturn of 2008.

But at least they got to hear stories from their trainers at Amazon about the occasional "unruly" shelf-toting "Kiva" robot: They told us how one robot had tried to drag a worker's stepladder away. Occasionally, I was told, two Kivas -- each carrying a tower of merchandise -- collided like drunken European soccer fans bumping chests. And in April of that year, the Haslet fire department responded to an accident at the warehouse involving a can of "bear repellent" (basically industrial-grade pepper spray). According to fire department records, the can of repellent was run over by a Kiva and the warehouse had to be evacuated.

Comments

Grievanceland

[SlaveToTheGrind]

So basically, Amazon is employing a largely unemployable population around the holidays and giving them some extra money they wouldn't otherwise have. The horror.

Clearly, something must be done to stop this brazen subversion of the welfare state.

Re: This is our future

[DNS-and-BIND]

This is why it's good that America is withdrawing from the world. Problems with police, race and gender inequality, healthcare, income inequality, disregard for the environment, woefully inadequate education system, warmongering and recently insane politics with a president who continues to publicly call for his detractors to lose their livelihood. Nobody wants to be the friend of such an awful country that engages in social Darwinism. Good riddance and the world won't miss them.

Re:This is our future

[MightyYar]

It might be me at some point in my life.

Have you ever worked in retail? You encounter a lot of old people - both as colleagues and as customers. Some seniors indeed work so that they can eat a little better. Or to keep an old house that they can't afford on their fixed income. Or simply for companionship or to kill the boredom of having nothing to do all day. If you are 80 and able to hold down a warehouse job, then you are doing pretty darned good. There are a lot of 20-somethings that can't hold down a job due to health or addiction issues. I'm doing what I can to stave that off - we've been in my house for 8 years and we still haven't completely furnished it, because we put so much into our retirement accounts. But a single health emergency could easily drain those accounts - I get that. I'd love everyone to enjoy a bountiful retirement, but I also recognize that "retirement" is a thoroughly modern concept and we're very lucky if we can enjoy it.