key takeaways
- Amazon is the world’s second largest employer with 1.5 million employees.
- A new report shows that Amazon will not have to hire 600,000 people by 2033, thanks to robots and automation.
- Amazon hopes the robots will help it save about 30 cents on each product.
Amazon, second largest The private employer, with 1.5 million employees worldwide, is accelerating the use of warehouse robots as part of a major automation drive, the new York Times Reported on Monday. The move could replace 600,000 human jobs by 2033.
Robots help Amazon warehouse workers with tasks ranging from sorting items to packaging them for shipment. For example, A new robot named Vulcan Can choose items from different shelves to pack. Amazon told wall street journal As of earlier this year it uses robots in 75% of its deliveries.
Times A look at leaked internal Amazon documents shows that the company is exploring creating and using more robots in place of human appointments in the future. According to the documents, the robots will not allow Amazon to hire new employees in the future to meet the growing demand for its products.
That means Amazon won’t need to hire more than 600,000 people over the next eight years thanks to filling in shortages caused by robots, even though the company expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. Amazon had not previously announced that it planned to hire this many people; That figure is shown in leaked documents.
160,000 warehouse jobs could disappear by 2027 as machines take over picking and packing. According to the leaked documents, the company will save about 30 cents on each product that is picked, packed and delivered to customers’ doorsteps.
Connected: Amazon asks thousands of employees to relocate or resign
According to the report, Amazon is using its Shreveport, Louisiana, warehouse as a template. The warehouse has already reduced staffing needs by 25% due to automation, with similar models planned across the country. At the Shreveport facility, once an item is in a package, robots take over the job with little need for human assistance to get the package out the door. The location uses approximately 1,000 robots, with plans to introduce more robots next year, and employs approximately 2,000 people.
Amazon, which is using robots in its warehouses over a decadeSaw its US workforce more than triple since 2018 1.2 million employeesaccording to TimesThe company expects to save $12.6 billion in labor costs between 2025 and 2027 due to automation.
Amazon said in a statement Times The leaked internal documents do not show the company’s overall hiring strategy, making it clear that those reports only reflect the view of an internal group. Amazon plans to hire an additional 250,000 people for the upcoming holiday season, according to spokeswoman Kelly Nantel, though she declined to specify how many of those positions would be temporary.
Connected: Amazon is expanding same-day delivery to thousands of small towns and rural areas
“Leaked documents often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans, and that’s the case here,” Nantel said in an emailed statement. “In our written narrative culture, there are thousands of documents circulating throughout the company at any given time, each with varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness. In this example, the materials reflect only one team’s perspective and do not represent our overall recruiting strategy across our various operating business lines – now or going forward. The facts speak for themselves: No company has created more jobs in the US over the past decade than Amazon.” Have made. “We are actively recruiting at operating facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season.”
one 2020 Study The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) measured the impact of robotic automation on jobs. The study found that for every robot added per 1,000 workers, American wages fell by 0.42%. At the time of the study’s publication, robots had replaced an estimated 400,000 jobs.
If Amazon’s automation plans work, “one of the largest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” said Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Prize Reported in Economic Sciences last year Times,
Amazon said earlier this year that it uses more than one million robots in its warehouses, its highest deployment ever, bringing the number of robots to almost equal the number of human employees.
according to amazon annual proxy statementThe average global Amazon employee will earn $37,181 in 2024, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this year. The same document revealed that The average American full-time Amazon worker earned about $10,000 more, or $47,990, per year.
RELATED: Here’s how much money Amazon employees — from software engineers to product managers — make in a year
key takeaways
- Amazon is the world’s second largest employer with 1.5 million employees.
- A new report suggests that Amazon may not have to hire 600,000 people by 2033 thanks to robots and automation.
- Amazon hopes the robots will help it save about 30 cents on each product.
Amazon, second largest The private employer, with 1.5 million employees worldwide, is accelerating the use of warehouse robots as part of a major automation drive, the new York Times Reported on Monday. The move could replace 600,000 human jobs by 2033.
Robots help Amazon warehouse workers with tasks ranging from sorting items to packaging them for shipment. For example, A new robot named Vulcan Can choose items from different shelves to pack. Amazon told wall street journal As of earlier this year it uses robots in 75% of its deliveries.
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