There’s no doubt that a showdown is coming between those who are jobless and a government that protects capitalists like Bezos.
PHOTOS: amazon.com web page, Michael Fleshman, Adrian Garcia, Wikipedia and Adrian.
Amazon is using thousands of robots instead of workers in its big, new California warehouses
During last December’s holiday rush, Amazon had 4,000 people working in its huge Tracy, California, warehouse — along with about 3,000 state-of-the-art new robots. After Christmas, when the company laid off most of the 2,500 temps it had hired, it kept the robots working.
Amazon has employed more than 15,000 new robots at 10 massive warehouses around the county in a technological leap that has its competitors gasping. Two of those new warehouses are in California’s Central Valley farmland, close to the I-5 interstate that links San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Up the highway from Tracy, Amazon’s Patterson warehouse covers almost 23 acres. Talks with the city in 2012 promised 1,500 jobs, but only about 500 have materialized so far. That’s because Amazon bought the producer of the Kiva robot in 2012, tested the robot in 2013, and had it in the new warehouses for the 2014 holiday rush.
The Kivas look like squashed bumper cars that skitter across the floor, down aisles and under shelves. The 320-pound versions lift as much as 700 pounds and handle Amazon’s large commodities, which are warehoused in Patterson. The smaller ones lift 300 pounds and handle the smaller items which Amazon warehouses in Tracy.
Both bring parts of an order to stations where they are collected, packaged, and shipped by actual human beings — at least for right now.
Amazon operations VP Dave Clark told reporters that the robots enabled the company to pack twice as much merchandize into their warehouses because they needed less space between shelves than humans did. And he said that they are more “efficient,” i.e. that they do things more quickly and at less cost than humans.
Each of the robots replaces four workers per shift, or 12 workers, total. That’s 60,000 jobs no human being will ever hold. And it’s just a start. Amazon will surely replace its other warehouse workers with robots. As the magazine Wired writes, “If Amazon can stay out in front, it can set the pace that rivals will have no choice but to try to match.”
Warehousing jobs along the I-5 corridor are a potential lifeline in the Central Valley, where unemployment runs to double digits and many agricultural jobs, have been lost to the drought, while those that remain are often seasonal.
But the jobs lost are not just those that didn’t materialize in Patterson and Tracy. They were in the giant shopping center and mall retailers that Amazon’s online sales are replacing.
After the Christmas rush, JC Penny, Sears, Kmart, Macy’s, Radio Shack, the Gap, and many other stores announced major closings, with layoffs estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
JC Penny announced that it was closing 40 stories and laying off 2,250 workers. It had closed 33 stories in 2014. But that’s nothing. Sears announced that it was closing 235 stores and had already closed 200 stores in 2014. RadioShack went bankrupt, closing 1,100 stores, after closing 175 in 2014.
And it may be the tip of the iceberg. “I believe that we are on the verge of a number of business failures of specialty retailers and some national general retailers,” bankruptcy expert Chuck Tatelbaum told reporters.
Amazon’s Clark says that “robots are not about eliminating jobs.” More robots mean more jobs, he says, with not even a nod toward the job losses in malls and shopping centers.
But even that may not be true. Earlier this year, Amazon challenged the tech community to compete in developing the next step in warehouse technology at this year’s robotics conference in Seattle. And used a video of the last human in the warehouse process to show what it wants to robotize.
