If there was ever a pragmatic argument for treating your employees with care and respect, the article in the url below suggests that Amazon may have just stumbled onto it (by mistake, of course):
"Is Amazon about to run out of workers? According to a leaked internal memo, the retail logistics company fears so. 'If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,' the research, first reported by Recode, stated."
Of course, if you are going to churn through employees without any concern for their health or wellbeing, the logical extrapolation of that approach as an employer is that, eventually, you will run out (as long as you exceed the replacement rate). The scale at which Amazon operates (and the ambition it has to expand) just means that it happens sooner to Amazon than it would anyone else:
"Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomical. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon's turnover."
If so, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy:
"Even Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, is worried. Bezos originally welcomed high turnover, fearing long-term employees would slack off and cause a 'march to mediocrity.'"
Even while there seems to have been a more recent change of heart:
"But in his final letter to shareholders as chief executive last year, Bezos said the company had to 'do a better job' for its employees. Amazon will commit to being 'earth's best employer and earth's safest place to work,' he wrote. In part, Bezos's change of heart is down to a wave of unionization efforts at the company's warehouses. But Amazon also faces a problem of scale. As the US's second largest private employer, it is now struggling to replace all the workers it loses."
It is central to Strategic CSR that any firm that does not consider its employees to be its primary stakeholder (all else equal) is dysfunctional in some way. Amazon has a long way to go. Hopefully this research will cause them to reconsider their business model:
"Workers and labor groups have long decried Amazon's working conditions and high employee turnover amid high injury rates."
Take care
David
David Chandler
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Amazon could run out of workers in US in two years, internal memo suggests
By Michael Sainato
June 22, 2022
The Guardian
