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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.
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.
This is our future, everybody: not enough money to buy a house, living as nomads in a mobile home, driving from seasonal work with no benefits, when we can get it.
Amazon is just ahead of the curve.
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?
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.
Many seniors had their retirement plans entirely wrapped up in their homes. Many of them plan to sell their homes at retirement, cash in the equity, downsize to something they can pay cash for, and live on social security. When the housing market crashed, no only did this not work, but their 401(k)s crashed, too.
The person who wrote this summary doesn't know the difference between "mobile home" and "RV". The former isn't really mobile in any meaningful sense so wouldn't make sense for this story. The latter is generally people who choose to live that way because they like traveling around.
Just like when the Okies came out of the dust bowl... No money, no work, no place to live.
At least now there are RV parks for them.
... is that Wired put a positive spin on this article. The author sees it as a good thing that Amazon can recruit Chuck and Barb and all the other "CamperForce Army" ... but not because circumstances are so dire that those folk have pretty much no other options left. They have become easy pickings for the corporate giants. Where millennials would get tired of the graft and quit shortly after learning the ropes [leaving Amazon with the headache of perpetually training new and thus under-performing] workers, the CamperForce Army have no other choice but to stick it out.
Perhaps even more scary, though, is the almost throw-away way that Chuck's downturn in fortune is described. He took his life savings and invested it with Wells Fargo - a supposedly reputable bank. They told chuck that his nest-egg of $250,000 would return him $4,000 a month as income. That's $48,000 a year. That's a ~ 19% return on investment from the capital - assuming that he did not draw down on the capital [which, if he did, would not last long]. Really? On what planet or in which universe did Wells Fargo believe that a 19% return was reasonable for Chuck's savings? As responsible bankers they would have known or should have known that a 19.2% return was unrealistic even in the most bullish of bull runs, even if Chuck was taking far more risk with his portfolio than his circumstances should allow.
Yet what happened to Wells Fargo? Any of their employees in Camperforce? It doesn't seem likely, does it?
The really scary thing, though, is this: how long will it be before the large conglomerates and the big banks look at the lessons of 2008-today and think, "Actually, this has been really good for us. We've created an under-class of people who are so desperate for income that they will work at slave-labor rates. We can pay them the minimum wage, dock them for imagined slights to go below even that, all of which maximises our profits. All we really need to keep this going is a steady supply of people whose circumstances are so dire that they are willing to do this... Hmmm... so maybe what this means is that all we really need is a good financial crash every 7-10 years or so..."
Do we really believe that, in the 21st century, we can't manage to contain boom-and-bust cycles? Are we really willing to settle for this?
What's curious is how Wired managed to spin this into a positive story. Retirees can't afford traditional housing, living in mobile homes, working in Amazon warehouses on minimum wage and being in danger of being killed or injured by the robots. All so Jeff Bezos can add an extra million to his current $81.5 billion. Welcome to the American Nightmare.
Who thick is screwed up to have people in their 50s working these kind of jobs? It's not because they're bored. They're found this out of desperation. Mostly because Wall Street took their pensions and their life savings. And if you don't think it's a problem well, you do realize Wall Street is planning to do it to you too, right. And no you're not one of them. Not of you're reading this post. Billionaires and multi millionaires don't waste their lives reading slashdot
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