Warehouses have been sucking up workers like an industrial-size vacuum
How the warehouse boom devoured America's workforce
Never in its history — perhaps even in the midst of the Great Depression — has America lost as many jobs in a few short weeks as it did at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In April 2020, more than 20 million Americans from all walks of life suddenly found themselves out of work. The country, like most of the world, was closed for business — and it took until August of this year for employment to finally return to pre-pandemic levels. Even today, staffing hasn't fully bounced back in many sectors, from hospitality to healthcare.
But not at America's warehouses. Thanks to the pandemic-driven boom in online shopping, the country's fulfillment and distribution centers continued to staff up at a furious pace. Today they employ 1.8 million Americans — up 37% since January 2020 and up 183% from January 2010.
Month after month, for years on end, warehouses have been sucking up workers like an industrial-size vacuum, reaching into every nook and cranny of the low-wage job market to hoover up more bodies. In the process, the warehouse boom has transformed the US economy, altering everything from wages and workplace safety to consumer prices and the supply chain.
It all happened so fast, we never got a chance to ask the most fundamental question: Is the sudden and dramatic shift to warehouse work a good thing? Has the explosion in warehouse jobs, taken as a whole, left us better off than before?
Workers often have to show up late at night or in the darkness of early morning to load and unload delivery trucks and put inventory on shelves. When people work, and how much they work, depends on the whims of online shoppers.
Higher wages for harder blue-collar work
First, the downsides. As my colleague Katherine Long outlines in her story about musculoskeletal disorders, warehouse work is dangerous. Because of the repetitive movements that warehouse pickers and packers are forced to make, the industry injures its workers at more than double the average rate for other occupations. Employers, especially Amazon, subject warehouse workers to constant surveillance, forcing them to work at breakneck speeds and perform tasks spit out by computer software.
"People are used as if they're machines, and they really resent it," says Steven Vallas, a professor of sociology at Northeastern University who has studied Amazon's warehouses. "There are strong connections between the hardships of the job — including the productivity monitoring and algorithmic control of their work — and psychological distress. There's an alienated feeling toward one's job."
Then, there are the hours. Warehouse schedules are brutal. Many require workers to show up late at night or in the darkness of early morning to load and unload delivery trucks and put inventory on shelves. When people work, and how much they work, depends on the whims of online shoppers, whose expectations of overnight delivery — or even same-day delivery — forces workers to spring into action to fulfill the never-ending cascade of orders.
When Alex Kowalski, a professor of human-resource studies at Cornell University, started studying the job quality of warehouse work in 2016, it was the unpredictability of their schedules that workers complained about most. Single parents scramble to secure childcare when they're asked to stay last minute; young workers find it impossible to maintain any semblance of a social life. And the unpredictable swings in hours lead to a big paycheck one week followed by a tiny one the next.
"The push to satisfy customer demand as quickly as possible has really led companies to adopt what they call a flexible staffing strategy," Kowalski says. "But it's really only flexible from the employer's perspective — not from the employee's perspective."
Volatile schedules and frequent injuries make for high turnover. Even before the pandemic, Amazon was thought to be hemorrhaging 3% of its hourly associates every week — an annual turnover rate of 150%, almost double that of the retail industry. For warehouses, keeping the floor stocked with workers is harder than keeping the shelves stocked with inventory.
As a result, they take workers that many other employers reject — those with criminal backgrounds, those who can't pass drug tests, those without high-school diplomas. As of 2019, 90% of warehouse workers lacked a bachelor's degree, making them ineligible for many white-collar jobs.
Which brings us to the primary upside of the warehouse boom. To replace the constant tide of departing workers, warehouses are forced to pay wages that are significantly higher than those of other blue-collar jobs. In June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonsupervisory warehouse workers earned an average of $21.55 an hour, compared with about $15 to $20 for those in fast food and retail jobs.
As my colleagues Long and Emma Cosgrove report, those wages can be life-changing for workers at the bottom of the economic ladder. "A lot of these people were able to pay their bills for the first time," says Vallas, the sociologist. "If you can stay with it, if your body allows for it, you may actually find that this is the most stable job you had in your life."
That's why so many workers — everyone from school-bus drivers and substitute teachers and hospital orderlies to short-order cooks and day-care workers and nursing-home aides — have flocked to the warehouse industry in recent years. For all the indignities and the dangers of the job, people are desperate for the higher pay. "It's a measure of the poverty of job quality in the United States," Vallas says. People don't work in warehouses because it's a good job. They work in warehouses because the other choices they have strike them as even worse.
Workers sorting parcels in the outbound dock at an Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California, on August 31, 2021.
The modern-day assembly line
The flood of warehouse hiring has been so large, and so rapid, that it has produced waves throughout the US economy. It has almost certainly exacerbated the widespread labor shortages that are making it hard for restaurants and nursing homes and other low-wage employers to operate at full capacity, because big chunks of their staffs have left for warehouse jobs.
That's bad for employers, who are being forced to limit their operating hours, and bad for consumers, who are having trouble scheduling appointments at backed-up doctor's offices and getting their kids into day care. But it's great for blue-collar workers of all stripes, who have seen their paychecks rise as employers are forced to compete with warehouse wages. And it explains why local officials have been going to such extreme lengths to attract warehouses to their towns, showering companies like Amazon with tax breaks and zoning exemptions.
"That's exactly the reason why regional economic-development offices and counties across the country pursue those types of investments," says Aaron Terrazas, the chief economist at Glassdoor. "It adds a source of competition for workers who typically there isn't a lot of competition for."
Vallas and others who have studied warehouses often describe them as a sort of modern-day factory. "Warehouse workers," he says, "are the assembly-line workers of contemporary capitalism."
But there's something discordant about such comparisons. Back in the 1970s, we talked about autoworkers as the backbone of the American middle class. Sure, the jobs involved hard labor, but people were proud to do it. And on the whole, with the steady pay and generous benefits and union protections, a job at a Ford or General Motors plant was a pretty good one. The same can't be said of a job at an Amazon fulfillment center.
Ford Motor Company workers on strike in Detroit in April 1950. AFP/Getty Images
Workers rallying in support of unionization in front of the Amazon LDJ-5 warehouse on Staten Island in New York on April 24.
To understand the warehouse-factory analogy, Vallas says, you have to turn the clock back even further. In the early 1900s, when the auto industry was first booming, there was nothing proud or rewarding about the work. The jobs were dirty, brutal, dangerous, and poorly paid. Ford found itself constantly hemorrhaging employees — prompting it to introduce a minimum wage of $5 a day in 1914, roughly doubling the average paycheck in an effort to retain its disgruntled workforce. It was only after the 1930s when, thanks to a surge in collective bargaining, autoworkers succeeded in winning better benefits and working conditions — producing the kind of proud, stable middle-class jobs that we now associate with assembly-line work.
We stand at a similar crossroads today. After years of failed attempts, the union victory last spring at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has, as my colleagues Sindhu Sundar and Juliana Kaplan report, breathed new life into the push to organize warehouse workers. It's possible that a combination of collective bargaining and market forces will force e-commerce giants like Amazon to turn warehouse jobs into a true pathway to the middle class, as the auto industry did following World War II.
It's certainly in their self-interest to do so: An internal Amazon memo from 2021 warned that if the company didn't do more to reduce its catastrophically high turnover, its warehouses could run out of people to hire by 2024. Treat enough workers as disposable, and eventually there won't be any workers left to dispose of.
Even now, it turns out, the quality of warehouse work varies widely depending on the job you have and the company you work for. Amazon may be notorious for treating its workers like they're expendable, but other retailers have better track records. And if you manage to stick with a terrible entry-level job for a few years, you have a decent shot at landing a position that comes with better hours and less surveillance. In his research, Kowalski found that some warehouses were much better places to work than others even within the same company — suggesting that individual managers can play a big role in shaping the quality of warehouse work.
Along with researchers at MIT, Kowalski has been testing the effects of twice-a-month committees, in which warehouse workers and managers come together to discuss problems and brainstorm solutions. That experience has given him hope that warehouse jobs, like their assembly-line predecessors, could wind up being a source of both personal pride and economic advancement.
"I'm not saying it's easy," he says, "but warehousing can be reimagined in a way that makes it a better place to work. Just giving workers more voice, more input, more say over the conditions of their work is the first step towards making the job quality at warehouses better."
