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This article seems to think that Distribution Centers will be the new "Steel Mills" of the taht that will provide blue collar workers with no college degrees a path into the middle class.
shopping has shifted from conventional stores to online marketplaces, many retail workers have been left in the cold, but Ms. Gaugler is coming out ahead. Sellers like Zulily, Amazon and Walmart are competing to get goods to the buyer’s doorstep as quickly as possible, giving rise to a constellation of vast warehouses that have fueled a boom for workers without college degrees and breathed new life into pockets of the country that had fallen economically behind.
Warehouses have produced hundreds of thousands of jobs since the recovery began in 2010, adding workers at four times the rate of overall job growth. A significant chunk of that growth has occurred outside large metropolitan areas, in counties that had relatively little of the picking-and-packing work until recently.“We are at the very beginning of a rather large transformation, and the humble warehouse is the leading edge of this,” said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “These fulfillment center jobs are not being created in the tech hubs that were growing before. We’ve broadened the winner’s circle.”
mericans have grown more comfortable ordering everything on the internet, including bulky wares like canoes and refrigerators. Warehouses, as a result, have become gargantuan, doubling in size since 2010, according to CBRE, a real estate services firm.
And while robots have started to intervene in the process, it still takes a lot of bodies to move hundreds of thousands of boxes in and out of these buildings every day. Warehouses serving the largest e-commerce sites typically employ upwards of 2,000 people.
The hubs of this network are far-flung. In Bullitt County, Ky., south of Louisville, warehouse employment surged to 6,000 in 2017 from 1,200 in 2010, according to the Labor Department. In Kenosha, Wis., once a manufacturing hub whose auto plants turned out Nash Ramblers and Plymouth Horizons, warehouse jobs grew to 6,200 from 250 in the same period.
Those places have the advantage of being surrounded by highways and rail lines that lead to some of the nation’s largest cities. They also have an abundance of cheap land and labor, two assets that have become increasingly vital to companies selling online.
This article os woefully wrong. Automatiojn will come for these jobs very quickly, and unless the distribution center is a huge hub they do not employee nearly as many people as factories and steel mills of old. If you are counting on Distribution Centers to save working class jobs, you are barking up the wrong tree. The only thing that can help is work that requires highly-skilled craftsmanship or direct consumer/worker interaction such as healthcare. Everything else can be automated and hence not a refuge for blue collar jobs.
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Plus Distribution centers are high stress (Both physically and mentally) jobs that pay close to minimum wage. Paying that badly doesn't give you a middle class. Plus they can just toss the workers out once they use them up and grab a new batch...
skyth wrote: Plus Distribution centers are high stress (Both physically and mentally) jobs that pay close to minimum wage. Paying that badly doesn't give you a middle class. Plus they can just toss the workers out once they use them up and grab a new batch...
You mean like mills and factories did before the workers organized? Guess we gotta IWW it up in the Amazon warehouses. Just gotta watch out for them Pinkertons.
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skyth wrote: Plus Distribution centers are high stress (Both physically and mentally) jobs that pay close to minimum wage. Paying that badly doesn't give you a middle class. Plus they can just toss the workers out once they use them up and grab a new batch...
You mean like mills and factories did before the workers organized? Guess we gotta IWW it up in the Amazon warehouses. Just gotta watch out for them Pinkertons.
That won't work, Amazon is already heavily investing in more robots and automation. The can get cheap loans (if they really needed those) to eliminate more jobs in the long term. They bought Kiva Robotics many years ago and since then have eliminated more and more jobs while developing warehouses from the ground up that need even fewer people.
Call centers used to be that way, low pay, high stress, high turnover. That turned around and the industry is expanding.
I would expect distribution centers to move this way, for a lot of reasons.
When you send your computer back to Dell, it's not always going to Dell. In a lot of cases, it's going to UPS, who have receiving centers that do basic triage on the units that come in. Some of the newer ones have the ability to 3D print casings and other materials on the spot to restore something to factory conditions.
I think the line between distribution center and receiving center is being blurred right now, and they will continue to merge over the next 10 years. Semi-skilled laborers who can do the things computers still can't do will always be in need.
There is a very interesting shift in on-line retail, lead by Amazon but with plenty of others following. It isn't about competing purely on price any more, because no-one wins that game. Instead they're looking to compete on unique and customised products and rapid delivery to your door. And yeah, there's a lot more human jobs in there than when it was just looking to emulate an Walmart style least cost model. Most of the labour will eventually be done by robots because that's the only way these models can be fast enough, but above that there will need to be a huge team monitoring performance and fine-tuning the system.
As to whether this solves the problem of a jobs free future economy... well I'm not sure on-line retail was ever the problem it was made out to be. Certainly not purely in retail, which is roughly the same employer it was before the internet.
The problem with declining middle class jobs is about a lot more than that. I mean think about a low pay, low respect job like a short order cook. If you take all the processes needed to make a meal, and if at the end you put the product on a plate and send it out to a customer that's a service job, and largely derided, and you'd be laughed at if you suggested there should be government policies to support and protect jobs like that. You do all those same processes but put the final product in a can and suddenly its a manufacturing job and people will start crapping on about the decline of honest work like than and you'll find stupid amounts of support for government policies to protect those jobs.
I guess what I'm getting at is we seem to spend a lot of time worrying about how to save or restore certain kinds of jobs, which are heavily steeped in nostalgia and maybe even a little mythical, when maybe what we should be doing is working on improving the pay and quality of the jobs are economy has right now.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
techsoldaten wrote: Call centers used to be that way, low pay, high stress, high turnover. That turned around and the industry is expanding.
Has it actually turned around? Over here (UK) they've always paid slightly above minimum (to try and aid retention), but are still high stress & high turnover
Kilkrazy wrote: A lot of 'UK' call centres seem to be in India.
There's plenty still in the UK - wife currently works in one. There seems to be a trend towards in-housing for a lot of the bigger companies that care about their reputation, as some people prefer UK call centres (I do, because of the language barrier).
They are very much short-term jobs in the UK though, for students and parents who need the antisocial hours.
Interesting article, I think a lot of working class people have been dealing with this reality since the 80's. However, I think the biggest risk to working class jobs is still automation rather than labour price competition with the far east. In fact, I can see potential for automation to cause manufacturing to come back from the far east because of better infrastructure and transport links in Europe, but not employ any where near the amount of people it used to.
In a way it will be good as it will cut the economies of places like China and India off at the knees whilst their big population will become more of an economic burden than an asset. Post industrial societies in Europe and the UK will have an easier time adapting, however eventually we will all have to accept a new paradigm where having a job is not a certainty and increasing amounts of the population are supported by the state.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/10/24 09:57:15
Haha, but seriously, most of the has-been steel mills and machine shops around here at least provided pensions and unions for their employees.
Amazon, meanwhile, actively destroys union movements not unlike Walmart and forces people to queue up before their shifts on their own dimes. Not to mention the active effort Amazon et al put towards the robotics/drone efforts.
Also, I got a day of their AWS training through work. Even on the developer side (which is supposedly an AMAZING place to be) they're creepy fething cultists.
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daedalus wrote: Haha, but seriously, most of the has-been steel mills and machine shops around here at least provided pensions and unions for their employees.
Amazon, meanwhile, actively destroys union movements not unlike Walmart and forces people to queue up before their shifts on their own dimes. Not to mention the active effort Amazon et al put towards the robotics/drone efforts.
I work for a pretty big company and went on a tour of one of the nearby factories. One of the things they showed us was an automated paint line where a vehicle would run through and robots would paint it. The guy giving the tour was a 45 year veteran who was very proud of it, and said that there used to be 8 people on that line to do each vehicle, and it would take much longer. All i could think of was 8 people in 3 shifts, 24 jobs that are gone.
People like to demonize illegal immigration and how American jobs get "stolen", but man I have to imagine for every job an illegal immigrant got, there are a few hundred that were automated away. It's like how people aren't really good at assessing risk - they're worried about sharks and terrorism, but don't own a fire extinguisher and drive after having a few drinks.
The "New economy" is very much like the old one; a tiny minority who control everything else, and squeeze so much out of everyone else that no-one has the time or energy to do anything about it.
I'm not sure who Jeff Bezos and the rest of them think is going to be buying their stuff when we're all reduced to serfdom again; at least the sharks gathering round the formerly public services have the advantage that they're not generally optional.
AndrewGPaul wrote: The "New economy" is very much like the old one; a tiny minority who control everything else, and squeeze so much out of everyone else that no-one has the time or energy to do anything about it.
I'm not sure who Jeff Bezos and the rest of them think is going to be buying their stuff when we're all reduced to serfdom again; at least the sharks gathering round the formerly public services have the advantage that they're not generally optional.
Ouze wrote:People like to demonize illegal immigration and how American jobs get "stolen", but man I have to imagine for every job an illegal immigrant got, there are a few hundred that were automated away. It's like how people aren't really good at assessing risk - they're worried about sharks and terrorism, but don't own a fire extinguisher and drive after having a few drinks.
That's correct, as far as I have read about US manufacturing overall the productivity has increased very much, while output (in $ has stayed the same as before or risen a bit) but the type of manufacturing has changed. The USA used to make everything and now it's more high tech stuff (airplanes, military, tech, limited edition) while simpler manufacturing is done in Asia, and the sector just doesn't need as many workers as before. US manufacturing jobs were not stolen by Asia or Mexicans but were made obsolete by robots and automation (which were paid for by cheap loans).
And for manufacturing that needs many people it wasn't just China with cheap labour but also logistics. Quick and cheap shipping enabled what the cheapest labour force in the world wouldn't be able to deliver. Otherwise retailers wouldn't get products as fast and flexible as they want them.
The same's now also happening in China. Robots have started replacing those workers too, nobody's safe and the jobs just can't come back. Why invest in people when robots can literary work around the clock, don't need heating (or fresh air or even lights), do the work perfectly, without tiring, without getting sick, without needing a vacation, without wanting a raise, without needing paid insurance (or pension contributions or anything like that).
We do still have industrial-grade manufacturing in the US. I can't speak intelligently on what percentage of that is automated.
Interestingly, though "them Mexicans" didn't "take our jerbs" directly by sneaking into the US and doing so, I do observe that my Ford Fusion is made in Mexico, along with a large number of their other vehicles. I also cannot speak intelligently on what percentage of it was done by people speaking Spanish and what percentage of it was done by machines with service manuals written in Spanish. Personally, it doesn't bother me any more than the other tenets of neocapitalism. Which is probably a reasonable amount, to be honest, but I knew what I was doing when I bought the car and did so anyway regardless.
The "service economy" concept that we were all sold so many years ago seems like, long term, it's the road to some sort of modern corporate run serfdom though. At least if the social and economic shifts that have occurred in my lifetime are any indicator.
TL;DR: Good news is I get my real life shadowrun. Bad news is that I probably won't turn into a dwarf.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/10/29 00:33:50
Mario wrote: Why invest in people when robots can literary work around the clock, don't need heating (or fresh air or even lights), do the work perfectly, without tiring, without getting sick, without needing a vacation, without wanting a raise, without needing paid insurance (or pension contributions or anything like that).
Only they don't. Work perfectly or without getting sick. Robots make errors, depending on how well they're engineered, and they break down. I work in the auto industry. Our suppliers have robot breakdowns, we have robot breakdowns, the big automaker we supply to has robot breakdowns. Costly, costly robot breakdowns.
Robots work great when you have precision parts for them to handle. Mass production parts often have variation that's tough for them to handle. Robot welding in particular is tricky, almost always requiring touch-ups down the line by actual people. And there's some stuff you just can't automate, or stuff you can automate but need a very specific kind of robot that's useless for anything else and very expensive. Manufacturing is still going to be done by people for quite some time yet, because a semi-skilled laborer still costs less than a million dollar robot. Especially in any industry where the product changes from year to year (automobiles) or isn't super high volume - the cost of automation, and the cost of upgrading the automation, can be significant.
People with jobs that involve working on a computer should look out, though. All you need to automate those is a good enough computer program. Expect a lot of middle management jobs to vanish in the near term. Heck, a lot of executive positions could also be automated just as easily by good enough neural nets - and they will, because majority shareholders will not give a fig about those executives and their big bonuses if a computer program can do the same job as well or even better.
The milkman and iceman don't have jobs any more, either. So should we still be using refrigerators cooled by blocks of ice brought to your house so someone still has a job? Things change, according to blessed Tzeentch, and we need to adapt to that.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/10/29 02:10:29
Except we don't - by deliberate design, I think. If we as a civilisation were serious about adapting, there would have been massive efforts taken as a society to help the thousands of people thrown away by the steel, mining and manufacturing industries over the last four decades. Instead they get dumped by the side of the road, given some paltry sum to keep them quiet, and forgotten about by the people raking in billions running these industries.
I mean, it must be unsustainable? Having an increasing population at the same time as deliberately shrinking the supply of jobs?
daedalus wrote: Haha, but seriously, most of the has-been steel mills and machine shops around here at least provided pensions and unions for their employees.
Amazon, meanwhile, actively destroys union movements not unlike Walmart and forces people to queue up before their shifts on their own dimes.
Its worth noting that there was a time when steel mills and machine shops were not union jobs and their conditions and pay were terrible. As I said above we need to stop thinking that the pay and conditions of the old jobs was somehow inherent to those old jobs, and instead focus on improving the pay and conditions of the jobs in the new economy.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
I mean, it must be unsustainable? Having an increasing population at the same time as deliberately shrinking the supply of jobs?
Neither North America or Europe have increasing populations - this is basically propped up by immigration. Part of the backlash against immigration is because of the lack of jobs, naturally.
What's terrifying is the short sighted-ness of the situation. We need a strong middle class that pays taxes, to support the infrastructure that makes the economy strong. There aren't enough rich to pay for it, not when the rich are spending so much political effort to avoid paying taxes.
Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
Robot communism people. That is the answer. It is the future! I for one welcome our new automated, futuristic and LGBT-friendly overlords. This will be our new symbol:
Spoiler:
Brings a new meaning to the phrase 'robotic revolution', doesn't it?
Without kidding, I am pretty sure that widespread automatisation will bring an end to the dominance of modern capitalism. The current system is simply not sustainable in the face widespread automatisation. And even better, it brings us the prospect, for the first time in Human history to finally establish a utopian society with a true post-scarcity economy where people have to do virtually no work anymore.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/10/29 20:37:27
I know someone who worked at an Amazon distributon cente in the UK.
Very poor working hours, practices and minimum wage. a draconian disciplinary regimen that effected things as diversely as visitor parking with warnings and threats of dismissal, and a hire and fire attitude that offered a toxic working environment and deliberately eshewed any form of work stability on point of principle; to let everyone know they could be replaced anytime and would not be missed.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
Mario wrote: Why invest in people when robots can literary work around the clock, don't need heating (or fresh air or even lights), do the work perfectly, without tiring, without getting sick, without needing a vacation, without wanting a raise, without needing paid insurance (or pension contributions or anything like that).
Only they don't. Work perfectly or without getting sick. Robots make errors, depending on how well they're engineered, and they break down. I work in the auto industry. Our suppliers have robot breakdowns, we have robot breakdowns, the big automaker we supply to has robot breakdowns. Costly, costly robot breakdowns.
Robots work great when you have precision parts for them to handle. Mass production parts often have variation that's tough for them to handle. Robot welding in particular is tricky, almost always requiring touch-ups down the line by actual people. And there's some stuff you just can't automate, or stuff you can automate but need a very specific kind of robot that's useless for anything else and very expensive. Manufacturing is still going to be done by people for quite some time yet, because a semi-skilled laborer still costs less than a million dollar robot. Especially in any industry where the product changes from year to year (automobiles) or isn't super high volume - the cost of automation, and the cost of upgrading the automation, can be significant.
That was more hyperbole for effect. My point was not that they are literary perfect but they are creeping in more and more manufacturing. Even if you were to set up a few thousand new factories a lot of the work would be done by robots and you wouldn't get big increases in employment (like some politicians promise when they say they'll "bring back the jobs").
People with jobs that involve working on a computer should look out, though. All you need to automate those is a good enough computer program. Expect a lot of middle management jobs to vanish in the near term. Heck, a lot of executive positions could also be automated just as easily by good enough neural nets - and they will, because majority shareholders will not give a fig about those executives and their big bonuses if a computer program can do the same job as well or even better.
That's true, we are in a new AI hype cycle (also with tangible results in specific cases) and it'll probably make things more efficient, except the people in middle management have some power to delay that. Workers at the lower end of the spectrum usually don't have much to fight with when it comes to protecting their work workplace. It'll depend on who wins the company internal fight.
John Prins wrote: Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
The claim that the middle class is needed to consume to make the rich rich is a claim I seem made a lot. It doesn't actually work. I mean sure, the current economy is built around businesses providing goods for the middle class, but that's because most of the buying power is still with the middle class.
But economies adapt. If money shifts almost entirely to the very rich, then the goods and services provided will shift almost entirely to the rich. This means the future isn't one of economic collapse, but one where the vast majority of people are almost entirely excluded from the economy. While most of us work for very low pay or collect a tiny universal basic income, to live extremely humble lives, almost all capital and resources are poured in to bespoke supercars and daytrips to Saturn, enjoyed by a scarce few.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
John Prins wrote: Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
The claim that the middle class is needed to consume to make the rich rich is a claim I seem made a lot. It doesn't actually work. I mean sure, the current economy is built around businesses providing goods for the middle class, but that's because most of the buying power is still with the middle class.
But economies adapt. If money shifts almost entirely to the very rich, then the goods and services provided will shift almost entirely to the rich. This means the future isn't one of economic collapse, but one where the vast majority of people are almost entirely excluded from the economy. While most of us work for very low pay or collect a tiny universal basic income, to live extremely humble lives, almost all capital and resources are poured in to bespoke supercars and daytrips to Saturn, enjoyed by a scarce few.
Wow, sounds great!
I have a feeling that could lead to some political repercussions. This "representaive liberal democracy" stuff was a fun experiment while it lasted!
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Orlanth wrote: I know someone who worked at an Amazon distributon cente in the UK.
Very poor working hours, practices and minimum wage. a draconian disciplinary regimen that effected things as diversely as visitor parking with warnings and threats of dismissal, and a hire and fire attitude that offered a toxic working environment and deliberately eshewed any form of work stability on point of principle; to let everyone know they could be replaced anytime and would not be missed.
Warehouse jobs are rapidly being replaced by robots.
John Prins wrote: Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
The claim that the middle class is needed to consume to make the rich rich is a claim I seem made a lot. It doesn't actually work. I mean sure, the current economy is built around businesses providing goods for the middle class, but that's because most of the buying power is still with the middle class.
But economies adapt. If money shifts almost entirely to the very rich, then the goods and services provided will shift almost entirely to the rich. This means the future isn't one of economic collapse, but one where the vast majority of people are almost entirely excluded from the economy. While most of us work for very low pay or collect a tiny universal basic income, to live extremely humble lives, almost all capital and resources are poured in to bespoke supercars and daytrips to Saturn, enjoyed by a scarce few.
It's an interesting concept, kind of like The Hunger Games or Walkaway.
I'm not sure the great mass of people will put up with it, though. Money, after all, only works as long as enough people believe in it.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/10/30 18:44:00
Amazing what you can afford when you refuse to pay tax.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
