I've learned a lot from my nomadic friends over the past year, from watching Youtube videos, speaking with them personally and attending the "Rubber Tramp Rendezvous" last January in Quartzsite AZ. One of the companies that many work for seasonally is Amazon. My friends can often work for 3 to 6 months to earn enough to live freely on the road the rest of the year.
Today's New York Times has a piece about Amazon's hiring practices for the Christmas season.
"The figures do not include the thousands of seasonal workers that join the company to help it with the crush of holiday shopping. Some come in R.V.s as part of a group Amazon called CamperForce.
The company pays for their campsites.But there are questions about how long Amazon’s fulfillment jobs will exist, as robots and other forms of automation become more capable at doing the jobs that now require humans.
Amazon is more aggressively using robots to help make the operations inside its warehouses more efficient. For now, the company said machines are not replacing people. Instead, they mostly move large shelves of merchandise to stations where orders are manually picked.
Many academic researchers and start-ups are working on robots that have the dexterity to pick orders automatically.
Amazon sponsors a competitionto encourage engineers to build more advanced warehouse robots.When those technologies are perfected, the employment picture inside Amazon’s warehouses could look very different. That day could be a decade or more away, though."
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