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Amazon’s Robot Workforce Could Doom the American Worker By Jason Boyce he year is 2030. Most humans have been replaced by machines in U.S. warehouses and factories. Millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to find jobs as robots pack, sort, ship, and carry out the myriad duties that just 10 years ago were the purview of living, breathing workers. There are little job prospects in sight for these workers as automation has completely taken over numerous industries. As fictitious as this sounds, it is not a scene out of a sciencefiction novel, but instead a scenario that could occur in the very near future. Take, for example, Amazon’s recent launch of Proteus—the company’s first fully autonomous mobile robot. This should signal that much of the company’s workforce faces extinction by automation in the coming years. Despite the inevitability that all industries will adopt some
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type of automation to improve productivity and profitability, it is important that lawmakers take steps now to protect the human workforce before big tech behemoths like Amazon begin to phase them out. Amazon certainly has plenty of incentive to replace its human workforce with automated machines. For instance, there are rumors
that Amazon is worried it could run out of workers to hire for its U.S. warehouses by 2024— putting the tech giant’s service quality and growth plans at risk, creating additional motivation to embrace the capabilities of robots. Labor shortages would be a thing of the past. The tech giant, which has a history of taking advantage of
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egregious tax loopholes, may even be using robots to game the system. For example, research and development expenses, a category that investment in automation could fall under, are deductible and eligible for capital expenditure tax credits. Meanwhile, only certain types of human capital investments are tax deductible. With its concern solely on the company’s bottom line, Amazon has plenty of other motives to transition to complete automation; robots can't unionize, they don’t get injured and require workers’ compensation, and they never go to managers and demand better working conditions. While nobody but Amazon’s corporate executives know the full reason for the company’s speedy shift toward robotics, a good argument can be made that recent efforts by workers to unionize have played a significant role. The company has threatened to withhold benefits and wages from
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employees who support union efforts, terminated pro-union workers, and is attempting to overturn the Staten Island warehouse union victory. Amazon is also notorious for its high injury rates among employees. In 2021 alone, 34,000 serious injuries were reported on the job at Amazon—resulting in plenty of negative press. The company has made it difficult for injured workers to be compensated or receive time off, deprived disabled and pregnant employees of reasonable accommodations, and has even fired workers who voiced their concerns about inadequate protections. It would be easy to dismiss this shift toward robotics as only an issue for one company—despite Amazon employing one out of every 153 Americans—but experts believe that automation could destroy up to 73 million jobs in the U.S. as soon as 2030. With the threat of millions of
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