Karen Weise
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They compete with other local employers for workers.
And so when you remove or over time kind of decrease the pressure they have on the overall local labor market, it can have an impact more broadly.
Amazon knows that this is extremely sensitive and kind of radioactive in the communities where they operate.
And I saw a bunch of documents that show us that they are actively debating how to manage this, how to communicate with their own workers, how to communicate with elected officials and other community members.
They've debated avoiding words like robot and instead using the term cobot, which implies collaboration with people.
They've talked about avoiding the word artificial intelligence.
They know that this is a scary concept because Amazon is a signature employer in the places where they operate and in our country.
Other people look to them for what the future of work will be.
And our nation as a whole is not good at helping people work.
adjust through these transformations in the workforce.
We don't have a great way of making sure the people who otherwise may have been hired have other job opportunities or have the job training to be able to do the new jobs that come out of a more automated future.
And so that is where the tension is, is Amazon is moving forward.
It makes sense for them to try to save this money here and be able to do other things with those savings.
But they do have this outsized impact on society and in the labor market.
And the reality is there's not a frank conversation about automation.
And there's no one with an overarching plan of how to help people adapt.