Amazon and The Labor Shortage

3/23/22, 9:17 PM Amazon and the Labor Shortage - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/podcasts/the-daily/amazon-pandemic-labor-shortage.html
Back to The Daily -28:08
TRANSCRIPT
Amazon and the Labor Shortage

What this economic moment means for the company and the people who work there.
Wednesday, December 1st, 2021
Sabrina Tavernise
From The New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise. This is The Daily.
Today:
Archived Recording
Holiday shopping is going on right now even as we speak, but —
Sabrina Tavernise
As the holiday season begins —
Archived Recording
Holiday sales could top $850 billion this year.
Sabrina Tavernise
— Amazon, one of the country’s largest retailers, is setting new records for sales. But it is also bumping up against a labor shortage.
Archived Recording 1
Fewer employees on the floor at most stores.
Archived Recording 2
Already impacting what’s in stores and online.
Sabrina Tavernise
That is challenging the very premise of its business model. My colleague, Karen Weise, on what this moment means for Amazon and the
people who work there. It’s Wednesday, December 1.
So Karen, you report on Amazon for The Times. And I wanted to ask you something I’ve been wondering about lately, which is we know
that there’s been this big national labor shortage, and we also know that there’s this supply chain problem. But when I went on Amazon
recently to buy something — in this case, it was a dog Frisbee, I’ll be honest — I was kind of surprised that that Frisbee showed up at my
door so fast. My dog, Clementine, did not need it urgently, yet there it was the next day, on my doorstep. So I’m wondering, why does it
seem like Amazon is not affected by what feels like this major disruption in our economy?
Karen Weise
Yeah, I mean, they were essentially built for this. This is what Amazon does. And they have the technology and the infrastructure and the
warehouses and the people in place all around the country to get that dog Frisbee to you faster than you think you even need it. But also,
they basically have this commitment to get it to you fast, doing whatever it takes. That is what has made Amazon so successful. And they
can spend and spend to do that in a way that other companies really haven’t been able to do. And I saw a stat the other day that said this
holiday season, almost 90 percent of American households are going to buy something on Amazon.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow. That’s incredible.
Karen Weise
Yes. And what’s all the more amazing is that they do this as they are losing employees every week. They have incredible churn. And
before the pandemic, it was about twice the level of their competitors. And they’re constantly having to replace people and constantly
training new people. Last week, they onboarded 45,000 employees in one week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/podcasts/the-daily/amazon-pandemic-labor-shortage.html?showTranscript=1 1/14
Sabrina Tavernise
But why do they have so much churn? Why are they having to hire so many people all the time? What’s happening?
Karen Weise
Part of it is that they’re just growing. They’re expanding. They’re opening up new warehouses around the country. And it’s also the
holiday season, and they staff up to meet seasonal demand. But also, this idea of high employee turnover has been baked into how
Amazon has operated for years. It actually goes back to this kind of system architected by Jeff Bezos a long time ago.
Sabrina Tavernise
Hmm.
Karen Weise
He thought people became less engaged and less excited and were less likely to propose new ideas and innovate if they were there for
too long. And so he really architected an approach to their hourly workforce that was focused on keeping people for about two years or
less, that they actually pay people to leave.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow.
Karen Weise
That they have career training for other professions, to go be a health aide or whatnot. And this was his idea, that the magic of Amazon
was this like highly motivated workforce, and that that drained out over time.
Sabrina Tavernise
So it sounds like Bezos is saying we’re not going to bother to keep people engaged beyond that kind of natural timeline of about two
years, and instead just embrace the idea that workers lose interest after that time.
Karen Weise
Yes. And that maybe this is this really rewarding, satisfying two years, and it helps you prepare yourself to do something else
somewhere else, essentially.
Sabrina Tavernise
So what does that model actually mean in practice? I mean, what does it look like in real life?
Karen Weise
Yeah, Amazon basically has created this kind of machine to hire people and to manage people. And it’s really invested heavily in
technology. So if you’re a worker, you’re might be picking products. And that means you take an individual product off a robot that brings
it to you. There’s a photo on a screen that tells you what to look for. A light automatically shines on the particular cubby on the robot
where you’re supposed to reach, and you put it in a box and it goes off on a conveyor. So there’s all this technology it’s invented to try to
help employees learn the job really quickly because they’re constantly bringing in new people and trying to make them be efficient
quicker.
Sabrina Tavernise
OK, so they’ve come up with systems where you don’t need skilled workers, or even really to train people extensively. So they can hire
and lose people all the time. And of course, we know Amazon becomes super successful. So it seems like this model works.
Karen Weise
Yeah, it did work for them. They became this iconic retailer. They created, essentially, e-commerce. I mean, Jeff Bezos became the
wealthiest man in the world because of his Amazon stock. The company hired voraciously. It approached Walmart as the nation’s largest
employer. And it also allowed them to staff where they needed to be. Because they had these systems in place to bring people in, they
could expand all over the country, really push product closer to customers, which is the big secret to Amazon. They get stuff close to you,
and they get it to your front door really fast. That is one of the magical things that keeps people coming back and back and back. But as
Amazon grew so much, there was a cost to that, which is that a lot of people were just kind of falling out of its system. It turns out they
had incredible turnover. They had about 150 percent turnover a year.
Sabrina Tavernise
150 percent? How is that even possible? Wouldn’t it be 100 percent?
Karen Weise
It’s 3 percent a week, which means, on average, every eight months they had to replace their entire workforce.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow.
Karen Weise
So they’re constantly hiring. And it’s bringing people in, training them, recruiting them, processing their drug tests, processing their
employment verification. All of that has a lot of cost to it and a lot of effort to it because you have to skill. And at the same time, you have
to find enough workers who want to do it. It’s hard work. It’s physically demanding on your body, not so much in lifting super heavy
packages, but you are on your feet. You’re not sitting down for 10 plus hours.
And you kind of have to be your own advocate to navigate the company, navigate the way it built HR. It had not invested enough in HR
to support the growth that it had. So it had these systems that were kind of rickety and would have false errors and stuff like that, and
you kind of have to constantly navigate for yourself. And some employees just gave up. It didn’t work for them.
Some people like the short-term work, but a lot of people kind of had their hopes dashed — that they thought this could be a job that they
could be at for a long time, and they’re bailing out pretty quickly. And the turnover is really high in the first couple of weeks and the first
couple of months. So there’s this whole host of reasons, but at the high level, something wasn’t working for a lot of people.
Sabrina Tavernise
Right, right. So Bezos has this idea that worker retention is not a priority. And so it makes sense that he created a workplace that people
don’t really want to stay in for any amount of time. That was the point, in some ways. And even though they made a ton of money, it still
seems bad for the company to have this level of attrition, right?
Karen Weise
This was this interesting thing. It was kind of this unresolved tension among people in Amazon’s headquarters and managers in its
buildings, of like how do we keep this going? How do we keep doing this? When we look at the projected growth that we have, we need
millions and millions and millions of people to apply because we’re going to be so big, and you need x number of people to apply. Only so
many of those actually show up.
And if any of them are falling out really quickly, you’ve got to go through that whole process again. There’s only so many able-bodied,
willing to work Americans that can do these jobs. So there was this unresolved tension of is this sustainable. Like, how do we keep doing
this? We’re going to run out of American workers.
At the same time, it was working. I mean, they were able to bring in enough people. And they were growing so fast, a former executive
once said it was like staying ahead of the tsunami. You were just constantly trying to keep ahead of this growth.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow.
Karen Weise
And it was like this long, long-term problem that you had all these other problems you were working on and all these other things that
you’ve been able to innovate your way out of, so, like, let’s just keep going with it.
Sabrina Tavernise
So it sounds like some people were concerned that it might not be sustainable, but ultimately, they had the attitude that there are lots of
workers and it would all be fine. They’d rather invest in making the service faster for customers than focus on human resources.
Karen Weise
Yes. Yeah, they were exactly that. I mean, one guy told me when he went from working in operations technology to working in HR, his
friends teased him that he was going on sabbatical.
Sabrina Tavernise
Huh.
Karen Weise
And that’s like a mindset of the type of the internal feelings at the time.
Sabrina Tavernise
It’s a real second-rate job.
Karen Weise
Yeah. Yeah, that they were working on it, but it wasn’t where the glory was, essentially.
Sabrina Tavernise
Mhm.
[Music]
Karen Weise
And you can kind of see how this mentality persisted, because in many ways, it was working. Amazon was able to replenish this
workforce and keep expanding and hire new people to show up. But then the pandemic really exposed these vulnerabilities underneath
the surface.
[Music]
Sabrina Tavernise
We’ll be right back.
Karen, what happened to the relationship between Amazon and their workers when the pandemic hit?
Karen Weise
So my colleagues Jodi Kantor, Grace Ashford and I spent months looking into exactly this question. And what we found was that, initially,
when the pandemic arrived in early March 2020, Amazon employees just stopped showing up for work, even in states where there wasn’t
a Covid case yet.
Sabrina Tavernise
Huh.
Karen Weise
People were just scared of the virus. And so Amazon introduced unusually flexible policies to try to keep people there. They let people
take as much time off as they want. They relaxed their productivity requirements. They boosted wages. But then they realized that
wasn’t working for them. They still didn’t know who would show up on any given day, and they have this huge flood in demand as
everyone’s staying at home and not wanting to shop in person.
And so they ended that era, and they basically said no longer can you stay home as much as you want, you need to come back. Because
they needed to be operating all the time to meet the incredible demand that everyone had, buying all the puzzles and the toys and
everything that people went looking for online instead of going to stores. And that demand level really stayed high for so long. For more
than a year, they had this elevated demand. They talked about how they were operating around the clock, at max capacity. And it ended
up being actually the most profitable era in Amazon’s history.
Sabrina Tavernise
Hmm. So it sounds like what you’re saying, Karen, is that initially, in the beginning of the pandemic, they really kind of ratcheted back, if
you will, their model, saying, OK, workers, you need some flexibility here. It’s a pandemic, after all. You can take time off. It’s OK. But
what happened was people didn’t come in, they didn’t know who was going to show up on any given day, and it wasn’t working. And so
they went back to the old model, which is not flexible, and they ended up being able to actually fulfill the orders and have profits rise at
record rates.
Karen Weise
Exactly, because they felt like they had made their buildings safe. And they knew all these industries had laid people off, and there are
people looking for jobs at this moment. A lot of people didn’t want to work, but a lot of people did. And so all of a sudden, they were this
very in-demand employer, where they could hire tens of thousands of people each week, potentially, to start staffing up their buildings.
And they were offering this $15 minimum. They had some bonuses at different points. And mostly, they were just hiring.
[Music]
They went on a hiring spree that labor economists tell me there is no example like it in American corporate history.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow.
Archived Recording
Amazon hired 500,000 people during the pandemic.
Karen Weise
They grew by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of that year.
Archived Recording
We know that Amazon has been on this insane hiring spree over the last year or so, especially during the pandemic. That continues.
Karen Weise
And it was just this huge expansion as they opened up more buildings.
Archived Recording
Demand has been huge during Covid. They’re planning to open 33 new fulfillment centers this year just to keep up.
Karen Weise
As they processed more product —
Archived Recording
The world’s largest e-commerce retailer announced it delivered more than 1 and 1/2 billion items around the world.
Karen Weise
— and they were kind of scooping up workers from different industries who were looking for a job. I mean, we’ve talked to workers who
were taxi drivers in New York or they worked on Broadway, they worked in restaurants, all the kind of classic industries that collapsed
in the pandemic. They turned to Amazon.
Archived Recording
Lines of cars wrapped around the building as people made their way to Amazon’s job fair. Amazon needs to fill both full-time and part-
time positions all over the country.
[Music]
Sabrina Tavernise
So basically, this employee model sounds like it was really holding up.
Karen Weise
Yes, but the pandemic kept dragging on, as we know. And some of the problems that Amazon had in its model were kind of exacerbated
by the pandemic. So for example, it’s kind of solitary work in the building. You go to your workstation, and if you’re picking products,
you’re basically picking products at your workstation, not near someone else, for 10 hours a day.
And it’s kind of good for social distancing, but it’s also pretty isolating. Or if you’re someone who might stress about maintaining your
rate, that can be extra stressful when the world is just super stressful. And so you started seeing people fall out of Amazon’s workforce,
as well. It had this infrastructure to bring people in, to hire at these just unbelievable numbers, but the pandemic also started showing
the strains in their system, as well.
Archived Recording
The workers here have said that the work is unstable and very difficult.
Karen Weise
You saw then eventually the first real labor organizing threat at Amazon in years and years.
Archived Recording
We have been looked at as disposable.
Karen Weise
By far the most aggressive effort in Bessemer, Alabama.
Archived Recording
[CHANTING]
Karen Weise
Meanwhile, around the country, the labor market was changing.
Archived Recording
Many of these businesses are welcoming back these crowds for the first time in about 18 months. So there’s certainly —
Karen Weise
I mean, we saw as more vaccines roll out, more companies were hiring again. The industry started coming back online. Restaurant jobs,
hotels, all the work that people had come from were now options.
Archived Recording
As America reopens, many businesses now face a new challenge, bringing back workers and doing it quickly.
Karen Weise
And then the pressure is still on Amazon as they continue to open more buildings and more buildings, and try to get back to normal
delivery times and really serve customers in the way they’re used to.
Archived Recording
It’s been called the Great Resignation. Workers said they were burned out, didn’t want to —
Karen Weise
At the same time, workers around the country are really starting to question what they want from work, what they expect from their
employers. You know, Black Lives Matter is happening, and you see it at Amazon and other employers, Black workers really taking a
stand and saying, like, I need to assert more power. I can assert more power in this labor market to demand changes.
Archived Recording
Workers have more leverage, more bargaining power than they have in years. And so we’re starting to see now simmering labor
disputes.
Karen Weise
So these are the types of questions that are surrounding both Amazon, but also just the broader labor market, as employers try to attract
employees who have more power than they have in a long time.
Sabrina Tavernise
So basically, Amazon is now suddenly facing a really different situation than before the pandemic. I mean, on the one hand, they have
this huge new demand, which means they need even more workers, but now the pool of workers want more from their jobs and are
harder to get.
Karen Weise
Right.
Sabrina Tavernise
So what does Amazon do?
Karen Weise
One of their primary responses has been to pay more and to throw money at the problem, essentially. They began raising wages earlier
this year. They’ve offered bonuses at different times. They’ve done these very large incentive bonuses, up to $3,000 to sign on, even more
if you’re vaccinated. They start really spending.
And they’re also willing to spend to meet that promise of getting you your dog Frisbee on time, because they have really since
particularly late summer started feeling the Great Resignation in full effect. And they said that for the first time it’s labor that’s
constraining their business, not physical storage space in their warehouses. And so they’re going to spend, they said, as much as $4
billion this holiday quarter alone just on labor-related expenses.
Sabrina Tavernise
Wow, $4 billion.
Karen Weise
$4 billion in one quarter. And they said to expect that they would have no profit this quarter. So they’re willing to wipe away their profit to
be able to deliver for consumers in the way that customers expect for them and have built them the loyalty over time.
Sabrina Tavernise
Hmm.
Karen Weise
And they’re also just having to adapt their operations to having unpredictable staffing. So the fulfillment center near New York City may
not be fully staffed, but they can take a product from Dallas, fly it by air through the middle of the country to another air hub to another
building to a delivery station to the van that goes down your street in New York City. So they’re taking more circuitous routes, trying to
match where they actually have people available to serve the demand. So that is part of that $4 billion also, is just operating in a less
efficient manner, but being willing to spend to solve that for now.
Sabrina Tavernise
So $4 billion is a lot of money. I mean, how does that compare to what other companies are having to do to cope with a labor shortage?
Karen Weise
You’re seeing such an interesting mix, where the kind of basis of an employer’s relationship with their employee is really starting to
show to be a critical part of their business. So for example, FedEx has also said they’re spending a ton of money trying to address this
issue in very similar ways — less efficient routings, things like that. But U.P.S. has said that they don’t have the same problems. In part,
they have a unionized workforce that is paid more, but is much more stable as a result of it.
Target said that they have not had as much labor problems, in part because they focus on attrition as opposed to attracting new people.
So you’re starting to see how critical labor was and these labor connections, and the kind of commitment back and forth from employer
to employee and employee to employer. Those are actually showing to be kind of critical business factors in being able to both have
profit, but also deliver for customers in the way that will create kind of a strong business in the long term.
Sabrina Tavernise
Does that suggest that the model that doesn’t spend that much time thinking about worker retention has kind of run its course? I mean,
how many quarters can Amazon spend $4 billion and have zero profit?
Karen Weise
It can do it more than most companies, but obviously not forever. And you also have to keep in mind Amazon is growing, and will
continue to grow. It has on the books almost a 50 percent expansion still planned. Like, these are buildings that are physically under
construction. And all of those will need to be staffed. So these problems and these challenges are not going away.
And I think that’s why you start seeing earlier this year a change in tone from Amazon. And there was a big moment, Jeff Bezos had said,
you know, I’ve always wanted to be the world’s most customer-centric company, and now I also want us to be Earth’s best employer. And
he kind of sets this, what he called, a coequal goal. We’re going to really try to raise our bar and really try to deliver better for employees.
You also just see a more humble tone from them. They’ve kind of acknowledged problems in a way they hadn’t necessarily before. So
that’s a very public commitment to this.
Sabrina Tavernise
But Karen, I guess I’m left wondering, can a company be both things? I mean, can there be a company that is both the world’s best
employer and the world’s best deliverer of stuff to customers? Like, is that possible or are those two things just fundamentally in
opposition?
Karen Weise
In Amazon’s mindset, they support each other. And the way they do that, potentially, is that by being able to better serve your employees,
you can better serve your customers. And you even hear that in language that their executives speak. I want to solve this problem for
the employees so that they can better serve customers.
Sabrina Tavernise
But is that true? I mean, it sounds like corporate speak to me. I don’t understand what it means.
Karen Weise
There’s a lot of corporate speak. I hear you. I hear you on that. It’s an ultimate question. I think it’s a fair question that companies across
the market are trying to figure out right now, is like how critical is this to our mission. It’s clearly been shown to be critical now, at this
moment, as we’re facing these labor shortages. So the question is, do they make that a big, audacious goal and put their best minds on it
to solve it, or not? Do they keep poking around the edges?
And they can raise wages more or they can offer more benefits. There’s a lot of things you can do that doesn’t change the model. We
never heard from them a statement that said we really want to bring attrition down. We’re really rethinking this. That was not language
we heard from them throughout our reporting. There was pride in offering jobs to people when they want it. There’s obviously, in this
moment, trying to staff up more. But we did not hear a strong rethinking kind of approach. And we’ll see. There are people inside
Amazon that really hope they will make it, but there’s also a lot of people who understand that the system has worked till now.
Sabrina Tavernise
What would it mean if Amazon’s relationship with its workers does not fundamentally change? I mean, if they don’t respond to this
moment by caring more about worker retention?
Karen Weise
In the short term, I don’t think you would see all that much. It’s Amazon. They’re going to keep going. They have these incredible
systems in place for hiring and bringing people in and training them and getting them up and going. At the same time, their response has
a lot in the past been related to wages. And they could keep doing that. I mean, they can afford to pay more if that’s the approach that
they choose. There’s actually a Wall Street analyst that says they should do that because they can do it more than anyone else, and it’s a
competitive advantage.
But at the same time, I’ve talked with enough folks who’ve worked in the corporate office here who have really concerned about this, and
one of them likened it to climate change, where you kind of keep burning fossil fuels, and you know you shouldn’t, but you kind of keep
doing it. But eventually, you’re going to run out. If you don’t address attrition, if you accept this high level of turnover that’s twice the
industry level, there’s only so many American workers.
And there’s things you can do to kind of attract different pools of workers. You can go back to your worker — I mean, they’re already
texting workers saying, hey, we know you left, want to come back again? We’re hiring. But at some point, you’ve got to keep r-tapping at
the same pool. And some people are willing to go back, but some definitely aren’t. And so that’s the looming question that I’ve never
heard anyone really articulate a way to solve without deeply addressing this issue.
[Music]
Sabrina Tavernise
Karen, thank you.
Karen Weise
Thank you.
Sabrina Tavernise
We’ll be right back.
[Music]
Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, health officials in the Netherlands said the Omicron variant was in their country
before two flights from South Africa arrived there last week. The timing suggests that the mutation of the virus was already in Europe
before South Africa sounded the alarm from a sample collected on November 9th. So far, 44 cases of the new variant have been
confirmed in 11 European countries. Health authorities there said all the confirmed cases in Europe exhibited mild symptoms or none at
all.
And a federal judge temporarily blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate that required all health workers in hospitals and nursing
homes to receive at least their first shot by December 6th. The judge, in a U.S. district court in Louisiana, said it was not clear that
mandating a vaccine for more than 10 million health care workers was constitutional. The ruling is the first step in the lawsuit brought by
14 states against the vaccine mandate for health workers. In November, a mandate for private employers was also blocked by a federal
court.
Today’s episode was produced by Robert Jimison, Rob Szypko and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Paige Cowett,
engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and
Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for The Daily. I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.
Dec. 1, 2021
Amazon
The Daily Subscribe: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts
3/23/22, 9:17 PM
Amazon Amazon and the Labor Shortage - The New York Times
and the
Labor
Shortage
What this economic
moment means for
the company and
the people who
work28:08
Listen there.
Transcript
March 23, 2022 • 32:37 March 22, 2022 • 25:57

More episodes of The Confirmation Hearing of Ketanji Brown Will Sanctioning Oligarchs Ch
The Daily Jackson
Dec. 1, 2021
Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise Produced by Robert Jimison, Rob Szypko and Mooj Zadie Edited by Patricia Willens and Paige Cowett
Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell Engineered by Chris Wood
Listen and follow The Daily
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher
Never miss an episode of The Daily We'll send you the latest episode as
soon as it publishes. Get it sent to your inbox.
Amazon is constantly hiring. Data has shown that the company has had a turnover rate of about 150 percent a year.
For the founder, Jeff Bezos, worker retention was not important, and the company built systems that didn’t require skilled workers or
extensive training — it could hire and lose people all of the time.
Amazon has been able to replenish its work force, but the pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of this approach.
We explore what the labor shortage has meant for Amazon and the people who work there.
INSIDE THE DAILY For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on
our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Get it sent to your
inbox.
On today’s episode
Karen Weise, a technology correspondent, based in Seattle for The New York Times.
Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Background reading
Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through Amazon’s vast mechanism that hires, monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid
the pandemic, the already strained system lurched.
There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.
Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.
Karen Weise contributed reporting.
The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood,
Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave
Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano,
Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie and Rowan Niemisto.
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima
Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello.
Sabrina Tavernise is a national correspondent covering demographics and is the lead writer for The Times on the Census. She started at The Times in 2000, spending her first
10 years as a foreign correspondent.
The Daily
This is how the news should sound. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, hosted by Michael Barbaro and powered
by New York Times journalism.
The Confirmation Hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson
Will Sanctioning Oligarchs Change the War?
Could the U.S. See Another Covid Wave?
The Global Race to Mine the Metal of the Future
Four Paths Forward in Ukraine
Inflation Lessons From the 1970s
The Story Behind a Defining War Photo
How Russians See the War in Ukraine
The Sunday Read: ‘What Rashida Tlaib Represents’
Putin’s Endgame: A Conversation With Fiona Hill
Inside Ukraine’s Embattled Cities
Will Banning Russian Oil Hurt Russia, or the U.S.?
Why Zelensky Poses a Unique Threat to Putin
On the Road With Ukraine’s Refugees
The Sunday Read: ‘The Waco Biker Shootout Left Nine Dead. Why Was
No One Convicted?’
The Death of the Competitive Congressional District
Why Russia Hasn’t Defeated Ukraine
How Europe Came Around on Sanctions
In Ukraine, the Men Who Must Stay and Fight
The Battle for Kyiv
The Sunday Read: ‘The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful
Cyberweapon’
Ukrainians’ Choice: Fight or Flee?
The Russian Invasion Begins
‘A Knife to the Throat’: Putin’s Logic for Invading Ukraine
Russian Troops Advance
‘Somebody’s Got to Save Us While We’re Saving Everybody Else’
Why U.S. Soldiers Won’t Come to Ukraine’s Rescue
An American-Style Protest in Canada
How Ukrainians View This Perilous Moment
The Rule at the Center of the N.F.L. Discrimination Lawsuit

Amazon and The Labor Shortage - The New York Times

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Amazon and The Labor Shortage - The New York Times

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

3/23/22, 9:17 PM Amazon and the Labor Shortage - The New York Times

Back to The Daily -28:08

Wednesday, December 1st, 2021

Amazon hired 500,000 people during the pandemic.

As they processed more product —

Meanwhile, around the country, the labor market was changing.

So what does Amazon do?

Karen, thank you.

We’ll be right back.

March 23, 2022 • 32:37 March 22, 2022 • 25:57

Listen and follow The Daily

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

Karen Weise contributed reporting.

The Confirmation Hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson

Will Sanctioning Oligarchs Change the War?

Could the U.S. See Another Covid Wave?

The Global Race to Mine the Metal of the Future

Four Paths Forward in Ukraine

Inflation Lessons From the 1970s

The Story Behind a Defining War Photo

How Russians See the War in Ukraine

The Sunday Read: ‘What Rashida Tlaib Represents’

Putin’s Endgame: A Conversation With Fiona Hill

Inside Ukraine’s Embattled Cities

Will Banning Russian Oil Hurt Russia, or the U.S.?

Why Zelensky Poses a Unique Threat to Putin

On the Road With Ukraine’s Refugees

The Death of the Competitive Congressional District

Why Russia Hasn’t Defeated Ukraine

How Europe Came Around on Sanctions

In Ukraine, the Men Who Must Stay and Fight

The Battle for Kyiv

Ukrainians’ Choice: Fight or Flee?

The Russian Invasion Begins

‘A Knife to the Throat’: Putin’s Logic for Invading Ukraine

Russian Troops Advance

‘Somebody’s Got to Save Us While We’re Saving Everybody Else’

Why U.S. Soldiers Won’t Come to Ukraine’s Rescue

An American-Style Protest in Canada

How Ukrainians View This Perilous Moment

The Rule at the Center of the N.F.L. Discrimination Lawsuit

You might also like