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 since last 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 labour 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 that allow it to minimise "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.
