Kaoosji added that Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. “We are hearing a lot of workers say, ‘I can just go across the street to Target or Walmart,’” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-executive director of an Inland Empire nonprofit called the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. One of the reasons is that Amazon is increasingly finding itself in a bidding war for workers with rivals in the area, which is a key logistics region because it is within a two-hour drive of 20 million potential customers and two of the largest container ports in the US. In the Inland Empire region of California, for example, Amazon may cycle through every worker who’d be interested in applying for a warehouse job by the end of 2022, the internal report warned. And that dynamic is already playing out in some parts of the country. With traditional competitors ramping up their investments in e-commerce warehouses, Amazon is no longer a slam-dunk top choice for those seeking work in these types of facilities and the starting minimum wage that comes along with it. In that survey, those who joined another employer soon after leaving the tech giant “rated Amazon significantly worse on work fitting skills or interests, demands of the work, shift length and shift schedule.”
In a company survey of 31,000 workers who left Amazon that was referenced in the report, some former Amazon workers say it’s worse to work at Amazon than some big-name competitors like Walmart or FedEx. But some workers have long complained of stresses unique to Amazon’s workplace, from the pace and repetition of the labor to the unrelenting computerized surveillance of workers’ every move to comparatively high injury rates. To be sure, part of Amazon’s turnover issue relates to how some employees view working in a warehouse as a brief pit stop on the way to better things. But now, as the internal report Recode reviewed shows, some inside Amazon are realizing that strategy won’t work much longer, especially if leaders truly want to transform it into “Earth’s best employer,” as Bezos proclaimed in 2021. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or, worse, disgruntled, according to reporting by the New York Times. In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon - it was even desirable at some points. Watchara Phomicinda/MediaNews Group/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images Workers sort parcels in the outbound dock at the Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California, in August 2021. Amazon’s internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like income levels and a household’s proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities the pool does not include the entire US adult population.Īmazon spokesperson Rena Lunak didn’t refute the contents of the internal report Recode obtained but declined to comment on it. The report warned that Amazon’s labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022.
“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.
#AMAZON FACTORY TOWN SERIES#
Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted. If that happens, the online retailer’s service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it. 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.
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