Automation

Bernie Sanders Thinks Amazon Warehouse Jobs Are Exploitative. He Still Wants To Save Them From Automation.

Opposition to technological innovation is as mistaken as it is bipartisan.

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Bernie Sanders | Rod Lamkey - CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom
(Rod Lamkey - CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom)

Bernie Sanders thinks that Amazon warehouse jobs are soul-crushing, backbreaking, and exploitative. He is also steadfastly opposed to any automation that would eliminate these undesirable positions.

"Big Tech oligarchs are coming for your job," said the independent Vermont senator on X in response to a story in The New York Times about internal Amazon plans to automate away up to 75 percent of jobs in their fulfillment centers. "AI & robotics must benefit workers, not the top 1%," he added.

One could argue that automation replacing physically demanding warehouse jobs is just such an example of robotics and AI benefiting workers.

Certainly, one would expect Sanders to think this, given the very public campaign he mounted against the company back in 2018 over the pay and working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers.

"There are deeply disturbing stories about working conditions at fulfillment centers run by Amazon and its contractors," said Sanders in a press release from that year. The same press release also included statements from Amazon workers who complained of "emotional" and "physical" trauma they experienced working in warehouses that they compared to a "turn of the 20th century American sweat shop."

One could, of course, challenge the picture Sanders paints of conditions in Amazon warehouses. The company itself certainly has.

Assuming Sanders believes his own rhetoric, one would assume he'd be happy to see these modern-day sweatshop jobs performed by robots who can (for the moment) not experience emotional trauma.

The aid of additional machines would reduce the physical strain of warehouse jobs. To the degree it makes individual warehouse workers more productive, one would expect the robots to raise their wages as well.

To be sure, the automation of Amazon warehouse jobs would, by definition, result in job losses. But economy-wide improvements to economic productivity would also enable former and would-be warehouse workers to transition to less strenuous work in other sectors.

Indeed, one can credit the general, slow, steady substitution of labor with capital for automating away countless numbers of dangerous, menial tasks that used to dominate the economy with safer, higher-paying gigs.

Despite far fewer people working on farms or in shoe factories, America's contemporary economy is not characterized by mass unemployment or low wages.

The power of Sanders' "sweatshop" accusation against Amazon is that everyone views those working conditions as an anachronism in today's economy, where millions make their living while sitting down and drinking coffee.

His opposition to automated warehouses is yet more evidence that the socialist senator does not appreciate the improvement in wages and working conditions that has happened as a result of capitalist productivity growth.

This is not an attitude confined to the American left.

The very conservative Sen. Josh Hawley's (R–Mo.) recent legislation to require human drivers behind the wheel of automated trucks is premised on the same notion that workers need protection from capitalists who'd automate away their jobs.

One couldn't imagine a finer example of literal horseshoe theory: Politicians on the left and the right both prefer an economy where we still need horseshoes to make a living and get around.

As popular and bipartisan as this strand of anti-capitalist thinking might be, it's deeply mistaken.

In the name of making jobs safer, better-paid, and more abundant, Sanders and Hawley want to end the technological innovation that's improved the working lives of all American workers.

The result would be all the things the two senators say they are against: fewer people laboring in worse conditions for less pay.