One of the reasons Amazon is spending billions on robots? They don’t need bathroom breaks. Arriving a few minutes early to the public tour of Amazon’s hi-tech Stone Mountain, Georgia, warehouse, my request to visit the restroom was met with a resounding no from the security guard in the main lobby.
Between the main doors and the entrance security gate, I paced and paced after being told I would have to wait for the tour guide to collect me and other guests for a tour of the 640,000-sq-ft, four-story warehouse.
Amazon offers tours to the public at 28 of its 1,200 US warehouses – a recruiting and public-relations tool to boost brand trust and address criticisms of poor working conditions. It was something to consider as I wound up having to go in the parking lot, propping open my rental car door for privacy.
Bathroom access is one of the most notorious criticisms of Amazon’s treatment of workers. Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers have reported having to pee in water bottles due to lack of time and access, and have even said their bathroom breaks are timed.
Zoe Hoffman, an Amazon spokesperson, said it was “absurd and false to connect a visitor’s tour experience to that of our employees”, adding that workers were allowed “regularly scheduled breaks” throughout their shifts.
None of this will be an issue if Amazon’s multibillion-dollar robot dreams come true.
Amazon cites 10 different robots through its warehouse network, though the Stone Mountain warehouse had only a handful of them, including the Roomba-like robots moving shelves of products around to stowers and pickers, an automated crane arm palletizing products, and a robot along a conveyor belt printing and adding shipping labels to boxes of products set to be mailed out of the warehouse.
Several sections of the warehouse were closed off during the tour for construction for upgrades, though specifics weren’t disclosed.
The tour began with a spiel about how Amazon is a great place to work, rattling off Amazon’s 1.5 million global employees and 1 million workers in the US, before playing a brief video of Amazon workers at a warehouse in the UK that made similar claims.
The tour guide touted Amazon’s vast seasonal workforce of 250,000 workers, claiming many of those workers are then hired full-time.
Criticisms of Amazon’s safety record, high injury rates, high employee turnover or the worker organizing efforts at the Stone Mountain warehouse after workers passed out on the job from heat exhaustion in 2022 were not mentioned. The tour guide, however, did finally offer guests a bathroom break before leading us through the warehouse.
The tour guide, from the local area, explained that the warehouse, which opened in late 2020, “came out of nowhere” from an area once covered in forest.
Throughout the first floor of the warehouse, the ceilings were covered with an assembly line conveyor belt of yellow Amazon totes, either empty or filled with miscellaneous goods from grocery items to electronics. The sounds of the conveyor belt bellowing through the warehouse’s first-floor ceiling is loud, and tour guests were given headphones to be able to hear the tour guide. Signs around the warehouse stated “hearing protection required” but several of the workers didn’t appear to have any earplugs or other protection.
The second floor of the warehouse included worker stations surrounding stacks of products in a dark room. Robots resembling Roombas shuffled the stacks between stations to a worker, directed by a computer about what to pick or stow, where to place it or pull it from and where to move it.
The tour guide claimed that before the robots’ arrival, and in some facilities where the robots aren’t used, a worker with a pushcart used to go around pulling or stocking products.
Back on the first floor, a single robotic arm was palletizing yellow totes of products. The tour guide claimed the facility had only one, had no plans to add more, and said it was only there to help human workers. The robot seemed to need human helpers as much as they needed it, unable to reach products that were too high in the tote, which were shuffled to the side for a human worker to fix and send back to them.
Not so long ago, one of Amazon’s top robot executives (to be clear, he oversees robotics and is not himself a robot) was telling journalists they need not worry about robots taking people’s jobs.
Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told the Guardian in 2022 he disagreed with the notion that artificial intelligence and robots wouold lead to the elimination of jobs at Amazon. “I just don’t see that at all,” said Brady. “We made our first serious investment in robotics over 10 years ago and in those 10 years we created more than a million jobs.”
He said: “The need for people to solve problems and use common sense will always be there. We are nowhere near that with robotics. It’s not even close. We have millions of years of evolution for the human brain that’s powered off 20 watts and a banana – that’s incredible.”
Now the message from the top is very different. Last June, Andy Jassy, the Amazon chief executive, told white-collar workers at the company that the advancement of AI would eliminate jobs at the company over the next few years.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years we expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce,” Jassy said in a memo.
In October, the New York Times reported on internal documents at Amazon that were presented to the company’s board, which included plans by the company to replace more than 500,000 jobs at Amazon and avoid hiring 160,000 workers by 2027. The documents cited an ultimate goal to automate 75% of its operations.
Amazon denied the report, claiming “the documents referenced paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans”.
The company laid off about 14,000 corporate employees the same month in anticipation of adopting more broadly artificial intelligence technology, and recently announced plans to lay off an additional 16,000 employees, though Amazon denied that AI and automation had any role in this round of cuts. An Amazon spokesperson added: “AI is not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions.”
Amazon is reportedly developing “humanoid” robots to pop out of delivery vans to deliver packages, eventually replacing the work of delivery drivers.
In November, more than 1,000 Amazon workers signed an open letter expressing concern that the company’s “all-costs-justified, warp-speed” approach to developing the technology puts jobs, democracy and the environment at risk.
Staff are seeing the impact already. An Amazon picker and stower at a warehouse in northern Georgia, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told the Guardian that human resources at their Amazon site had gradually shifted from humans to artificial intelligence and computers.
“We have had a big change at my warehouse in HR over the past six months. At first I noticed that the human resource personnel were just not available as much,” they said. “We now have a reduced staff for our HR, and we now have an automated texting service for us to use to contact HR.”
They also claimed Amazon pushes for cross-training and that workers in areas such as picking and stowing are learning other technical skills such as robot repair, in anticipation that their jobs may eventually be automated.
“People are getting hurt stowing and picking, so that’s one of the reasons why Amazon is wanting to get robots that can do the work of the picker and the stower,” the worker said. “They’re letting us know that it’s smart for us to learn how to do something different, like robot repair work or something in it, because eventually this might be replaced.”
An Amazon spokesperson said: “We’re preparing employees for the roles of the future because we believe investing in workers and our employees is more crucial than ever in this rapidly advancing technological age, especially with AI.”
