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Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Weren't these jobs like, feared already cause they treat you less like a machine, they treated you like shit to the point youd have a good chance that you have to step over a dead body eventually?
Their turnover rate is ridiculously high and supply chains as an industry have been steadily moving towards automation. Robots are going to keep replacing unloaders, loaders, and pickers just as AI is going to start replacing buyers and dispatchers in the near future.
I worked for FedEx and it seems to me that Amazon didn't start this practice which is why it's confusing to me why they get the spotlight, it's just industry standard it seems (Amazon, FedEx, and UPS)
The place I work at had a 400% turnover rate for the 90 day period. Luckily I've seen other places and it doesn't seem like its a company wide thing, but a location to location issue. They pay higher than minimum wage as a standard, but that still didn't entice me or others to continue working there because of how much labor vs pay it is. Plus the stress of angry managers doesn't help it at all.
That's an important point. A lot of these places can't find or keep people even when they pay rather well. A few years ago an old neighbor of mine got a job at (I'm pretty sure) UPS and it paid well but the work just wasn't worth it and he quit and took a pay cut to have significantly less stressful job. To be fair he had a pretty bad back that caused him a lot of pain.