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I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

motherjones.com

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Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#21

Post by Permit »

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Wow, that's truly incredible. I didn't realize anyone had reached this point. I'm excited to see this stuff progress, but I can't help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be created by this.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#22

Post by winestock »

Mike Daisey's book, 21 Dog Years, briefly discussed conditions at Amazon's warehouses even though cube farm hell was the focus of the book. I don't have the book, anymore, but, going from memory, Daisey's account matches those of the author of the Mother Jones article.

http://www.amazon.com/21-Dog-Years-Doing-Amazon-com/dp/07432....

That's right; it's an Amazon link. Ironic, I know.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#23

Post by jfoutz »

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#24

Post by winestock »

guelo wrote: post #15
temphn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> costs of corporate capitalism But under non-capitalist systems such as in the USSR you were machine gunned or bayoneted for refusing to work (starting with the Kronstadt Rebellion and ending with Solidarity), and had no option to quit or leave the country. Capitalism hasn't yet completely eradicated all drudgery from the world, but Mother Jones isn't about to acknowledge that it's better that 4000 marginal workers…

Another less extreme alternative to soviet communism is a unionized workforce similar to what we had in the US 30 years ago before Democrats gave up the fight and American capitalists started shipping jobs overseas in order to break up unions.

Why is this guy being downvoted? If automation were so imminent, then why weren't the robots brought in five or ten years earlier? Why did business interests work so hard for China to get "most favored nation" trading status during the Clinton administration? Why do people go on and on about the human capital of China (iPhone factories and so forth) if not for the assembly-line grunt work?

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#25

Post by latj »

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

People have been saying this for a long time. Automated picking has been around for years. When Amazon bought the large e-commerce place I worked for, the first thing they did was turn off the automated picking and replace it with people. When its cheaper and more simple to use robots, people will use robots.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#26

Post by tsotha »

I worked at a company developing the warehouse management software. This was back in the mid '90s, but we didn't have a single customer that ran his warehouse like the one in the article. Picking is a crappy job, and everyone knows it, so pickers weren't expected to move too fast. If you showed up to work for a few weeks as a picker you'd get promoted to another position. Most of the people who got hired were ex-cons and drug addicts, so only about one in three lasted more than a day or two.

I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#28

Post by winestock »

anigbrowl wrote: post #17
ericd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

There's unions and unions. I don't have a problem with such organizations as representatives of working people's collective interests, but the relationship between unions and business in the US can be terribly adversarial such that 'collective bargaining' often ends up looking more like mutual attrition. It might be that historically the diversity of the US is partly responsible; where there is wide social and cultur…

Upvote for "There's unions and then there's unions." I live in Michigan and have known people who personally attest to all of the negative stereotypes about the Teamsters and the UAW. On the other hand, Germany manages to have a world-class economy based on manufacturing highly-sought factory-made goods, and they do it all with high-wage union labor.

I'm a red-blooded American, so I prefer as few regulations as necessary. But maybe -- just maybe -- we can copy a few of the things that those wacky krauts are doing.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#29

Post by ericd »

ck2 wrote: post #5
ericd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Re-read that article and tell me you want any human being to have to work like that for more than a week in a supposedly 1st-world country. Those people are subsidizing your low prices by taking 800mg of advil a day to be able to get a paycheck and deferring the health disaster they will have in a few years without insurance. If you do not have unions or government regulation, big business sets the rules and you end…

Read past the first couple of words of my comment and you'll see that I agree that worker protections are important, I'm just saying that unions have historically created a whole host of hard to solve problems and are not a good way to deal with this. No job availability is still generally the worst possible outcome in a country without strong social safety nets like the US, so don't underestimate the importance of competitiveness.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#30

Post by aorshan »

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Zappos was one of the first companies to use Kiva Electronics to automate their processess. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0
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