Amazon Now Has More Than 1 Million Employees (cbsnews.com) 41
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Amazon.com said it now has about 1 million employees after hiring 250,000 workers in the third quarter, part of a growth spurt driven by booming ecommerce sales during the coronavirus pandemic and a milestone for a company founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookseller. Despite its rapid ascent, Amazon still has fewer workers than the nation's biggest private employer, Walmart, which has 2.2 million global workers.
Even so, Amazon's explosive growth underscores the historic shift in financial might from manufacturers such as General Motors, U.S. Steel and General Electric. In the 1950s, these three corporations were the country's biggest employers, with a combined workforce of more than 1 million employees at the time. Today, the three employ about 400,000 workers as the U.S. economy has shed factory jobs in favor of service-oriented work. In a conference call on Thursday, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company hired "a lot more people to support the strong customer demand." After hiring 250,000 full-time and part-time workers in the quarter ended in September, Amazon has hired another 100,000 workers in October, he said. The jobs pay a minimum of $15 an hour and include benefits such as health insurance, retirement benefits and parental leave, he added.
Even so, Amazon's explosive growth underscores the historic shift in financial might from manufacturers such as General Motors, U.S. Steel and General Electric. In the 1950s, these three corporations were the country's biggest employers, with a combined workforce of more than 1 million employees at the time. Today, the three employ about 400,000 workers as the U.S. economy has shed factory jobs in favor of service-oriented work. In a conference call on Thursday, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company hired "a lot more people to support the strong customer demand." After hiring 250,000 full-time and part-time workers in the quarter ended in September, Amazon has hired another 100,000 workers in October, he said. The jobs pay a minimum of $15 an hour and include benefits such as health insurance, retirement benefits and parental leave, he added.
Not Developers, Robots, Robots, Robots (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost all these jobs are soon to be replaced by cheap "AI" driven warehouse and delivery systems.
Still better than working at Bethlehem Steel. (not the pay though)
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Anyway I guess if they packaged all seller products in a uniform type container then they could probably automate it better but there's probably tradeoffs with that.
They could put each product in a special container, that is designed to be opened by a machine. But then you'd need machines and/or humans to put the products in the containers. It's smarter to spend your effort making robots which can handle disparate products. That's future-proof.
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Market forces are why it won't happen (Score:4, Interesting)
"AI" won't replace us any time soon either. We still haven't progressed in any meaningful way since the 90s for real-world "AI" decision engines, we've just developed computers powerful enough to make the very pinnacle of late 90s technology (much of which was only accessible for military and industrial use) available to everyone via the Internet. Show me something new that isn't a repackaging of what we already had.
We also barely have any functional, general purpose robotics in production still. Just look at Boston Dynamics to see how we have progressed in this regard. We're so close, yet so far. We can program robots for very specialised tasks (we have those in factories all over the place) but they often need to be designed from scratch at great cost, often seeing an RoI only when products go largely unchanged for long periods of time. McDonalds will probably replace all their main restaurant staff with robots very soon because they make a static set of products which barely change over time, however, Amazon has to deal with anything/everything.
We're all quite safe and so are most of those jobs for at least a decade or more. Especially so if people work more from home.
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"Humans have a general set of useful skills and can still specialise and adapt quicker than robots in the year 2020. "
Unfortunately half of us have an IQ of under 100, so the specializing and adaptation sucks.
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Keeping the robots working right requires relatively expensive staff compared to regular warehouse workers. The AI and control software has to be tuned and debugged, and the robots require mechanics to fix. If the ratio of entry level staff reduced compared to specialists needed is not high enough, then it's cheaper to hire entry level warehouse workers. Plus humans have the added flexibility to adjust to changes faster.
GM and others learned this lesson. Maybe the balance will change, but right now it's not
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Iffy.
One thing the modern corporate environment loathes is independent thought. For all the talk of critical thinking skills, it is in such a narrowly defined range to be indistinguishable from a script.
And that is precisely where robotics excel.
It isn't about increasingly sophisticated robots, but dumbing down the environment to where anything outside of a set of parameters is an error.
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Meanwhile Bezos is rich enough (Score:3)
Re:Meanwhile Bezos is rich enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Time tracking (Score:3)
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to the point of working people to death.
"to the point of working HAPPY people to death."
Get it right, please.
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'we must all hang together, or ... we shall all hang separately'
Bezos knows he can abuse the workers in anyway he wants because anything done to rein him in will be "socialism" and 1/2 the country would rather be poor and "free".
This is like a Judge Dredd scenario only for capitalism. We are well on the way of having very, very few mega employers that will control the economy. The wealth will continue to percolate up, all according to plan.
meanwhile 1/2 the country thinks minimum wage and access to health
Not unusually brutal in my area (Score:3)
I hear when you're a developer for Amazon they basically meter all your work and breaks. They pay decent but the average employment span is 2-3 years because of the mad pace they force you into.
I don't know how it is division by division, but my friends who went to software engineer positions at Amazon in my area said it was pretty typical of any other employer. I know from LinkedIn, every one who left my team for Amazon was there longer than 3 years.
Believe me, I WANT to believe what you're saying is true, I just know about 2 dozen people that contradict your statement and 0 that support it.
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So why isnt anyone asking that someone else to give the amazon employees $100,000/each instead....?
Jealousy makes you stupid.
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"So why isnt anyone asking that someone else to give the amazon employees $100,000/each instead....?"
They already get that. The average pay of an Amazon employee is 103.000$.
Re: Meanwhile Bezos is rich enough (Score:2)
What is the median compensation? That's actually meaningful, unlike the average.
Poor writing quality (Score:2)
Poor writing. Those factory jobs were taken by machines and robots.
Let machines do the work! Let humans relax. Soon, as was said in a comment above, Amazon will have more work done by robots.
Workweek Length [wikipedia.org]: "In 1926, Henry Ford standardized on a five-day workweek, instead of the prevalent six days, without reducing employees' pay. Hours worked stabilized at about 49 per week during the 1920s, and during the Great Depre
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Let machines do the work! Let humans relax.
Ford had the right idea. Pay workers well. Give them time off to enjoy themselves. Maybe they'll even buy a car (a Ford, of course).
That won't work as well for Amazon. Because robots don't read books.
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Let machines do the work! Let humans relax.
Ford had the right idea. Pay workers well. Give them time off to enjoy themselves. Maybe they'll even buy a car (a Ford, of course).
And shoot them if they get uppity.
Some people might call them (Score:2)
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A ford shift job was a great job. You only had to tighten some of the bolts.
That's a lot of unemployed (Score:2)
Given that each Amazon job replaces 3 or 4 other jobs.
But, still, at least it's a nice guy getting rich on the back of the public for a change, right?
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A big telecom I contracted for often outsourced their management of H1B visa workers so that any funny business could be blamed on the contractor of contractors. And there was funny business.
If the middle contractor were caught, a different contractor would be brought in. And the caught one often just re-formed under a relative's name and were the same executives under a different org name.
Essentially those fly-by-night
Jean-Baptiste Émmanuel Zorg would say: (Score:2)
Seriously vapid reporting (Score:3)
A couple of erroneous assumptions. Reduced employment numbers are not a reliable indicator or reduced financial might. Look to traditional industries that could not out-source their work yet are doing very well financially. Railways, for example, employ less than 1/3 of the numbers they did in 1980, yet individually, and collectively, continue to set records for productivity, and revenue, on a regular basis. Technological changes are the primary reason for those improvements.
And the US economy (and any other first world economy) did not shed factory jobs in favor of service-orientated jobs. Between outsourcing and technology, factory jobs dried up, and service-orientated work for many was the only option available.
Pretending a job at Walmart or Amazon are a replacement for manufacturing jobs, that provided full-time work with middle-class income and benefits, is a joke. Retail never provided much more than semi-decent wages, but, a person working full-time still lived above the poverty level. Walmart, and their ilk, not only pay much less than manufacturing,and even traditional retail, a lot of the work is part-time, a combination that is viable only because other traditional options have disappeared.
It may be the reality of our times, and it may bel evolution in action, but, there is not much to admire, or like, about the changing face of work today,
banana for scale (Score:2)
How Many People Work for the U.S. Federal Government? [fortune.com]
There are more than 2 million people on the nation’s payroll.
I Quit Corporate in Exchange for Freelance (Score:1)