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

fundamentals

[supernova87a]

I don't know where to find a good explanation of the idea, but my gut belief about our economy today is that there is a major oversupply of labor. We have too many people for what our economy supports. At least in most service + manufacturing sectors.

Cry all you want about stagnant wages, inability to find a job, etc, etc. -- there are just too many people now for what the economy can sustain.

Part of it is automation, but part of it is the legacy of the baby boom years where our economy expanded in jobs capacity, and now that shrank (jobs) but the number of people is growing. Too many people competing after too few jobs, what do you expect? And at the same time those people demand higher wages, while wanting cheaper prices for the things they buy! While trade and overseas manufacturing is able to effectively provide even more labor supply competition for the jobs we do still have here.

How can this work out possibly well?

Re:This is our future

[MindPrison]

Should be called - Adam Ruins the American Dream.

Because where I live (in Scandinavia), buying a house is the best damn investment you can ever do. They're built like a tank to handle our weather conditions, they often last 100+ years. And I can only explain my case, I bought a small house out on the countryside, luckily our country has plenty of good infrastructure, I got fiber internet, I got a train station near by that will take me to any bigger city within an hour, and our smallish town got plenty of competing warehouses anyway.

I bought my house roughly 10 years ago, now it's worth 3 times the price I paid for it (my neighbors bought their houses for 2-3x the price I paid for mine, and their's are smaller). And since I paid in cash (meaning I didn't take up a bank loan) I don't pay any mortgages. Now...if my basic school math serves me right, not only did I at least double the value of my home, but I also lived in it for 10 years - rent free. The amounts of repairs doesn't even match a years renting, so no worries there either. Considering the rent-fees in our neighborhood, I'd say I couldn't even invest in the stock market and earn that much interest, not even in a high risk market.

So each to their own I guess.

Re:This is our future

[Solandri]

If everything is working properly, home prices should track closely with the rate of inflation. That something as fundamental and developed (i.e. not a new industry) as your home appreciated 3x in just 10 years is evidence that something is seriously wrong with the housing market where you live, not evidence that a house is a good investment.

Both the tech bubble and housing bubble was propagated by people citing stories like yours, stirring people up into a frenzy to invest so they wouldn't miss out on huge returns, which causes even more price appreciation which seems to confirm the stories. Unless there's been a fundamental change in how much people earn (so they can afford more expensive homes), 300% appreciation in 10 years is completely unsustainable and likely means there will be a sharp downturn in the near future.

You should probably be making plans to sell the home to cash out your gains before that happens. Switch to renting for a few years until the market collapses, then buy another house (for a lot less than you sold your home) when prices have returned closer to their historical norms.