PROBLEM:

With Britain suffering through its worst cost-of-living crisis in decades - owing to high inflation and soaring energy prices - hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Coventry this month demanded a wage hike. If the demand is not met, they say they will go on strike in November, just ahead of Black Friday and the holiday shopping season. As with other recent labor actions by US rail workers and British Royal Mail employees, the Amazon workers' move has kicked off a debate about who is to blame for the threatened disruption: the elves in the workshop or Father Christmas?

Amazon owes its success to a variety of factors, including a sophisticated data-driven approach. But its real genius lies in its logistics breakthroughs - including route optimization, fleet planning, and metadata management - that allow it to minimize "click-to-ship" time and provide customers with unprecedentedly fast and reliable on-time deliveries. Amazon Prime-branded planes and trucks shuttle packages around the world, operating like clockwork even through a pandemic that grounded much of the rest of the economy.

The mastermind behind the operation is a man named Jeff Wilke, who combined Taylorism (dividing production into narrow, closely monitored and measured repetitive tasks) and Fordism (assembly-line techniques) to create a warehouse model capable of processing more than a million units per day. With the help of robots and close surveillance, human "pickers" and "stowers" now process several times as much merchandise per hour as they once did.

But the system has become notorious for testing human employees' limits. Recent investigations have shown that much of the convenience that Amazon customers enjoy comes at the expense of Amazon's lowest-paid workers.

In 2019, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that within a decade, robotic systems will be advanced enough to grasp items with the dexterity of a human hand. Three years later, Amazon looks to be making progress toward that goal.

A recent video published on the company's science blog features a new "pinch-grasping" robot system that could one day do a lot of the work that humans in Amazon warehouses do today.

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