From Amazon: a reminder that labor shortages may be less of a problem than some believe.
[I]nterviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.
To be clear, if this account is accurate, Amazon is not talking about lay-offs, but about future recruitment (of people) that it will not be making.
The New York Times:
Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.
At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of its operations.
Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans 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 parades and Toys for Tots.
However well intentioned, I am not convinced that parades and Toys for Tots are going to make up for the missing jobs.
The conventional wisdom is that technological revolutions create more jobs than they destroy, and that has indeed generally been the case in the past. Less discussed is whether there could be a gap between the destruction of the old jobs, and the creation of the new. There is at least one striking precedent for that too. Should such a gap open up, and there is some evidence that one is already opening up in the white-collar job market, the political implications — on top of everything else — could be very tricky indeed.
We don’t know how much of a problem, if at all, this might be, and we certainly don’t know how it could be managed, but the possibility that it is on the way is yet another reason to doubt that the country needs to be importing large numbers of new workers — new workers for jobs that may not last for very long.