Robots have been a staple at Amazon warehouses for more than a decade, performing tasks formerly completed by humans, including picking, sorting and moving packages. Now, Amazon plans to make human labor less necessary in its facilities by replacing more than half a million jobs with robots, The New York Times reports.
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Internal Amazon documents suggest that the company is looking into building and using more robots to replace human workers. The publication doesn’t specify if this will result in massive layoffs. However, the robots would allow Amazon to avoid hiring new workers to meet increasing demand, translating to 600,000 jobs replaced by 2033, according to the report.
Amazon announced in June that it had hit a workforce milestone of deploying more than 1 million robots in its fulfillment and delivery network, making it about two-thirds the size of the company’s human workforce. The Amazon documents show that the company’s goal is to automate 75% of its operations, The Times reported.
The shift to increase the role of robots in Amazon’s warehouse could save the company billions of dollars each year. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak estimated the annual savings to be as high as $4 billion by 2027, according to a CNBC report.
The report also says the company wants to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a “good corporate citizen” through greater participation in community events such as local parades and Toys for Tots. And the leaked documents discuss avoiding using terms like automation and AI, instead using terms such as “advanced technology,” and replacing the word “robot” with “cobot” to suggest collaboration.
“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here,” an Amazon spokesperson told in an email. “In this instance, the materials appear to reflect the perspective of just one team and don’t represent our overall hiring strategy across our various operations business lines — now or moving forward.”
The spokesperson said “no company has created more jobs in America over the past decade than Amazon” and that the company is actively hiring at operations facilities, with plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season.
Impact on jobs
Amazon is the third biggest employer in the US, behind the federal government and Walmart. To date, the company employs an estimated 1.5 million employees, most of whom work in warehouses or as delivery drivers.
Only a handful of companies in the US have more than 600,000 employees on the payroll. Delivery company FedEx has an estimated 550,000 employees. Reducing its size as reported by The Times would be akin to FedEx disappearing entirely.
Studies have been done on the impact of robots on human wages. As of 2020, every robot added by a company per 1,000 workers reduces US wages by 0.42% and has cost humans an estimated 400,000 jobs.
“Our investments will continue to create substantial employment, emphasizing higher-paying positions,” Amazon said in an email. “In particular, and as mentioned in The New York Times story, efficiency gains in one area enable us to invest in other areas — both existing and entirely new ones — that create additional value for customers. While it’s difficult to predict the future precisely, our track record demonstrates that we’ve consistently been a major job creator while simultaneously investing in upskilling our workforce for evolving roles.”
