Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees

More and more facilities are becoming robot centric. The only reason humans exist in the robot facilities is because they do something robots don't do well yet. Usually grabbing objects of varying shapes, sizes, and weights.

It's unsurprising that these facilities are moving at such a pace that they're becoming increasingly dangerous and inhumane.

I have, in the past or present, watched with immense data fidelity as humans at these facilities became the weakest link and that weakness only grew as robot evolution further outpaced them.

I'm convinced that the only humane future for these facilities is one entirely devoid of humans. I doubt you'll ever convince management to slow the robots way down and keep them like that.

There are robots available today that are a lot less dangerous than the Kiva/Amazon deathfloors. But I don't see that remaining true as KPIs endlessly march upwards.

Amazon is working to automate their logistics as much as possible --but I think they should do it in a way more human way. They should design their process with people in mind and keep people's well being and limits in mind when designing as well as when managing people.

Unionization is not an answer, well it might be but only temporarily as most people in fulfilment will be out of the picture. Given that, I would hope Amazon does the right thing, but I kind of doubt it.

The reality is our pop growth is slowing so that these low skills jobs are being eliminated might not be detrimental to our future workforce. The problem is we have sent medium/semi skilled jobs overseas and didn't prepare our workforce for it nor did we "tax" the job shipping to compensate the injured (affected) workforce. We're slapping some tariffs 30 years too late, but I guess it's better then nothing.

The article quotes a rate of 300 items per hour.

If it were 100 items per hour, you'd still be talking about ten cents per item of labour cost.

No-one would care if their items cost that much more.

I know two companies which have been trying to robotise their biggest warehouses since the begin 90s; after many updates in hardware and software it still does not work for the reasons you state (and probably more).