There will (probably) always be sectors of the economy in which there are labor shortages, at least for a while, but generalized panics about the U.S. “running out of workers” never seem to reflect the impact of automation.
Via the Wall Street Journal’s Sebastian Herrera:
The automation of [Amazon’s] facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans. The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities. . . .
Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.
The good news for (some) humans is that the takeover of some tasks has freed them up to do more interesting work. One woman interviewed by Herrera has moved on from working at the warehouse to overseeing robotic systems and is now paid 2.5 times as much as she was when she first joined Amazon.
Herrera:
Robots are also supplanting some employees, helping the company to slow hiring. Amazon employs about 1.56 million people overall, with the majority working in warehouses.
The average number of employees Amazon had per facility last year, roughly 670, was the lowest recorded in the past 16 years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, which compared the company’s reported workforce with estimates of its facility count.
The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175, the analysis found, an indication of the company’s productivity gains. . . .
Amazon has trained more than 700,000 workers across the world for higher-paying jobs that can include working with robotics, the company said.
“You have completely new jobs being created,” such as robot technicians, said Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics. Warehouse workers are being trained in mechatronics and robotics apprenticeships.
That’s encouraging. Nevertheless, it seems as if Amazon, the second-largest private-sector employer in the U.S., has reached some sort of plateau when it comes to the number of its employees. After years of dramatic expansion, the roster reached about 1.6 million worldwide in 2021 and has been roughly flat since then.
Oh, yes.
Herrera:
Amazon is also rolling out artificial intelligence in its warehouses, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said recently, “to improve inventory placement, demand forecasting, and the efficiency of our robots.” Amazon said it will cut the size of its total workforce in the next several years.
Somehow, I don’t think this country is going to have to worry too much about a labor shortage in the years to come.