Austin Morreale worked at the Amazon fulfillment center in Edison, N.J.. “It was 10 hours of pretty much mind-numbingly boring work, pretty much standing in the same position for the whole shift,” he said. “But at the end of the shift, I was drenched in sweat and aching like I hadn’t ached since I was playing competitive soccer.” Morreale was slow, he says, and kept messing up the patterns for efficiently putting items on robotic shelves—known as “stowing.” He couldn’t “make rate”: Amazonese for keeping up with the pace of work. In Amazon’s fulfillment centers, writes The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 11-12, 2021), human productivity is measured by an overall pick or stow rate calculated for each worker at a robot-fed pick-and-stow station.
On the job, no one ever stood behind Morreale and barked at him to work faster. But twice a day at a stand-up meeting, his shift managers told the group how everyone was doing. They knew because Amazon’s software, and an assortment of sensors in the warehouse, tracked workers’ every move. Knowing that if you don’t make rate you’ll get a warning, triggered by an algorithm, and if it happens often enough your job is in danger, can be a powerful psychological spur to work harder, and possibly to exceed your physical limits. (In 2019, Amazon reported 5.6 injuries per 100 workers. The average rate for warehouses in the U.S. that same year was 4.8 per 100).
More than a century ago, Henry Ford pioneered systems for speeding up work that we take for granted today (see Chapters 1 and 10). What Morreale experienced was Amazon’s 21st-century, algorithm-driven successor to Fordism. It’s a mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering, and an ever-growing array of technologies. This system of technologically supercharged management can be benevolent, or sinister, or both.
Imagine the delight of Ford, if he could know, to the millisecond, how long it took every worker to complete a task, every day, in every facility he owned. Imagine what early time-and-motion experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth could have accomplished had they been able to discard their film cameras and replace them with millions of hours of video captured from the digital cameras that watch every station at Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
Classroom discussion questions:
1. How would the use of time studies, detailed in Ch. 10, be impacted by the Amazon approach for setting standards?
2. What are the responsibilities of operations managers in dealing with productivity and safety at their warehouses?
