I recently toured an Amazon fulfillment center; anyone can do it. From what I can tell, they mostly give tours of their robotics sortable facilities, the newer ones dominated by Kiva robots and other automation technologies, to give the sense of a company doing what was barely imaginable a decade ago.
And to Amazon’s credit, it is a truly impressive affair. In the three-million-square-foot fulfillment center I toured, conveyor belts ran the length of the facility. From one end of the building, you could barely make out packages moving along them as any more than little specks. On many levels, stowing and picking stations surround a fenced-in center area dominated by Kivas, all carrying 2,000-pound stacks of goods, ready at the click of a button to move to the closest picking station to fulfill an order. For the moment, the robots are mostly separated from the people for safety reasons, but the new autonomous Proteus robots will soon change that.
I heard many impressive facts on the tour, but there was one that really stuck with me: this facility had been open for a year, and it was running at about 30 percent capacity. If the facility were pumping out 300,000 packages per day outbound (I didn’t catch the exact number, but it’s a reasonable estimate for a sortables facility of this size), it could handle a million. This apparently is not an uncommon situation: Amazon reserves extra capacity at its fulfillment centers for peak season, roughly from late October through Christmas, when it can sometimes see more than twice the normal volume demand.
From a labor organizing perspective, this is a terrifying situation. It means that, for most of the year, if you did the hard work of organizing a strike by the thousands of workers at any given Amazon fulfillment center, it would hardly register on Amazon’s radar — not because the company has the resolve not to flinch in a labor dispute, but because they could so efficiently reroute order…
Auteur: Benjamin Y. Fong
