Is Amazon about to run out of workers?
A new leaked internal memo shows that the massive company fears that it will run out of workers by 2024.
The research says that if business as usual continues, “Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024.”
Analysts and experts say that Amazon is right to be worried.
The company has an astronomical staff turnover rate.
Before the Covid pandemic, Amazon was losing about three percent of its workforce weekly. This is about 150 percent annually.
When compared to the average annual turnover overall in transportation, warehousing and utilities, that rate was at 49 percent in 2021. In retail, it was at 64.6 percent in 2021. That is less than half of Amazon’s turnover.
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is worried as well. While Bezos originally welcomed high turnover, he seems to be coming to fear it now. Bezos did not want an entrenched work force, calling it a “march to mediocrity” in the past, and saw low-skilled jobs as being short-term.
But in his final letter to shareholders as the chief executive in 2021, Bezos said Amazon needed to “do a better job” for its employees. He wrote that the company would commit to being “earth’s best employer and earth’s safest place to work.”
There are many reasons for Bezos to have to change his mindset. Part of it is due to a wave of unionization efforts at Amazon warehouses. But there is also a problem of scale. It is the second largest private employer in America, and is now struggling to replace all the workers it loses on such a regular basis.
Workers and labor groups have long condemned and called out Amazon’s working conditions and high employee turnover amid high injury rates.
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