Just as Andy hoped. He'll cut headcount without layoffs and the ones left will be the ones who couldn't get jobs elsewhere. Those who couldn't find work elsewhere will be easier to abuse because they will believe they don't have other options.
Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. [...] “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, which hasn’t previously been reported, says.
Why do people keep touting warehouse numbers when the RTO conversation comes up? It's not like the warehouse employees are the ones working from home. It seems like such a bizarre thing to bring to the conversation. I get that warehouse employees have a rough go, but it's a totally different conversation.
Warehouse wages will rise until it’s more economical to automate the remaining jobs that have not yet been automated. Then there will be no warehouse employees.
Amazon has had to raise warehouse pay [1 [2], definitely screams labor shortage to me. This makes sense considering structural demographics and a shrinking participation rate in the US labor force [3]. I would not have expected Amazon to just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and say "we are all out of workers"; they have to compete like everyone else for a shrinking pool of folks.
They have run out of folks to abuse at the previous price point. The wage floor will continue to rise. Even Bank of America is raising wages for tellers [4]. Demographics are destiny, all that jazz.
[3] https://www.ebri.org/retirement/content/new-research-of-u.s.... ("A new research report published today by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) taking a historical look at labor force participation and employment data in the United States found the prime working age population (25–64 years old) has significantly fallen and is being filled by older workers. At the same time, the labor force participation rate of those ages 65 or older has not reached its pre-pandemic level, while that of the prime working age population has reached that level")
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41500201 ("Bank of America is pledging to pay its bank tellers and other hourly workers at least $24 per hour starting in October. The company says that this pay raise, from $23 per hour currently, will affect “thousands” of its 212,000 employees. The wage increase will particularly affect tellers and other customer-facing employees, such as call-center workers.")
(~10K Boomers retire per day, 3.6M per year; ~1.8M people 55+ die every year in the US, ~5k per day; roughly half of which are in the labor force, so ~2.5k workers actively in a job die each day; ~20% of the population is retired today, in 10 years that'll go to ~30%)
Along with the existing productivity dip due to lowering of the hiring bar to meet DEI KPIs, and with this brain drain of their top talent, it is going to be a rough ride for Amazon.
Desperate people work harder and longer for less pay. That's pretty much peak number go up. It's a horrible long term strategy, but companies are not minmaxing for long-term retention, nor even quality at this moment.
Sometimes companies forget that their entire existence relies on a middle class that has money to spend.
Way back in the 60s in my country the government in consultation with the business world came up with a genius idea: give everyone a bonus pay check to spend on holidays. It created entire leisure industries nobody could imagine.
Right. We're only really dealing with the population of employees who strongly prefer working from home.
That's likely disproportionately employees who have families (hence a commute), so skew older and more senior. These employees will take the secret sauce they learned over many years at Amazon and spread it to startups and other orgs.
Anecdata, the younger people in my team are reacting worse than the more senior ones. Senior / more tenured their response has been: "well, this is how it was for the past 20 years before COVID". While the juniors are the ones who dislike the idea of long commutes, less WLB (no more quick errands during work) etc.
I struggled with the wording there and got it wrong.
I didn't intend to imply incompetence or anything negative.
Some folks have made choices to commit to things and take up responsibilities requiring stable, location-based employment.
"Couldn't get jobs" should be taken to encompass anyone that is subject to labor market friction of any sort.
