Automation in the logistics industry using Amazon as an example

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"We are no robots" - UNI bei Amazon “Researchers from the TU Berlin have won the “Picking Challenge” of the online retailer Amazon with their robot. What competition means for the future of the online giant and its employees.(…) With the competition, the online retailer is pursuing a very specific goal: automating its logistics as completely as possible. If Amazon wants to keep up with the increasing number of orders and the growing demands of customers, it has to make the processes in the logistics centers more efficient. The group is still refining the storage system and optimizing the use of its employees – to the point that some of them already feel like “robots”.…”Article by Andreas Menn and Stephan Happel from May 29, 2015 in Wirtschaftswoche online externer Link (“Amazon: Robots are changing the future of online retail”). See:

After 21 years: Amazon closes “Mechanical Turk” – probably affecting hundreds of thousands of Clickworkers worldwide
“On “Mechanical Turk” you can pay people to classify masses of photos, for example. After more than two decades, it's over.
After almost 21 years, Amazon is closing the “Mechanical Turk” platform, which allowed people to be paid for work that computers were unable to do for a long time or that took algorithms too long to do. The US company has thaton the associated website made public. It says that the service will be closed permanently on September 30th. The only reason given is that programs, tools and services are regularly reviewed in order to make “adjustments”. CNBC quotes an expert as saying that the service has been in decline for a long time, most recently due to the increasing performance of AI models. No new customers have been accepted since July. (…)
To date, more than 500,000 people have offered their services on MTurk,writes CNBC . The more tasks AI models were able to take on, the fewer resources Amazon put into further development. As a result, many switched to other platforms that offer similar services. Nevertheless, there are still people who earn their money full-time on “Mechanical Turk,” CNBC quotes the expert as saying: “They’re worried now.”Article by Martin Holland from August 26th, 2026 in heise news (“After 21 years: Amazon closes “Mechanical Turk”)
- Reaching for more control: Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk
  “Data work: After 21 years, the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform is being discontinued. This does not mean that the human work behind AI becomes superfluous (…)
  A brief thank you for “helping to shape the crowdsourcing world” was followed by a request to update your payment details by the deadline, as payouts would only be processed until the end of October. There is no statement from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos yet.
  The closure of the largest platform for data work and human evaluation of AI systems affects hundreds of thousands of data workers around the world who, despite poor working conditions, are almost entirely dependent on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The abuse of bogus self-employment was well known, but due to the global structure of the platform it was tolerated in favor of the clients, who thereby had extensive control over the amount and payment of remuneration. When asked by Junge Welt last week, Camilla Salim Wagner, researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute, reported that the data workers had not only developed experience, but also user profiles, with "good quotas often allowing access to better-paying tasks." “If the accounts are closed here now, many of the workers will have to rebuild them from scratch,” she said. This also destroys the employees' networks and mutual assistance offers. Since many of them will move to other crowdsourcing platforms, the “over-exploitation of Amazon Mechanical Turk risks repeating itself or even intensifying.” (…)
  Given this race, the closure of Amazon Mechanical Turk is not a purely operational adjustment to Amazon's wishful thinking that AI models have already made human data labor obsolete. Rather, it is an attempt to gain partial control over the data market. "When Amazon Mechanical Turk launched, it was offered as a product, but it was designed primarily for Amazon," Krystal Kaufmann, a former activist at Turkopticon, told jW. “In addition to the anonymous requests, the data workers cleaned up duplicate entries on amazon.com and labeled images that were used for the development of “intelligent products” such as Alexa.”
  According to Kaufmann's assessment, the main reason for the closure is that Amazon "simply no longer needs the service provider" and wants to make it more difficult for the competition, which has placed orders on the platform, to access high-quality services. And: Amazon has alternatives. Amazon Mechanical Turk will be discontinued, but the group will remain integrated into central infrastructures of the data ecosystem through services such as AWS Data Exchange, a marketplace for data sets from third-party providers, and the Amazon Marketing Cloud. In addition, according to Kaufmann, the requirements for data work have developed in recent years "beyond simple labeling" to an "increasingly far-reaching specialization" of workers, which has increased the costs of labor. Because of the now even more comprehensive control, Amazon could offer its services at a disproportionately higher price…”Article by Laurenz Dingebacher in the young world from September 29th, 2026
Exploitation at Amazon: Flexible into poverty
“New forms of day labor: Under the pretext of modernizing and digitizing the world of work, Amazon is pushing ahead with the dismantling of employees' rights
Since the 1990s, many large companies have outsourced increasing parts of their work to third-party companies with lower labor costs, a practice known as “outsourcing.” Amazon further escalated this heightened form of exploitation and shifted parts of its development costs online to a swarm (“crowdsourcing”) of subcontractors in low-wage countries, self-exploiting startup companies and even to voluntary, completely unpaid private Internet users. Amazon achieved this with a platform called “Mechanical Turk” (M-Turk). This was launched at the end of 2005 as a development platform for processing "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs, programming tasks) and within a very short time enjoyed rapidly increasing attention in the developer scene.¹ With the help of artificial intelligence, it is not machines that carry out the tasks of humans, but humans that carry out tasks assigned to them by computers.² Amazon introduced digital day labor and combined the darkest working conditions with complete electronic surveillance. Amazon sells micro jobs online for pennies. This means working on demand, for starvation wages, at your own risk and without any social security. Amazon uses a large number of its digital day laborers, who call themselves “Turkers,” for self-promotion and market manipulation (…) In addition to digital, Amazon “Flex” also saw the return of the well-known day labor in the parcel services sector. The lousy working conditions are glossed over by entrepreneurs as a “gig economy” (…) The marketing of this false self-employment as flexibility⁵disguises the fact that their freedom is above all a freedom from protections that have been fought for in regular employment relationships and anchored in law: protection against dismissal, statutory vacation, contributions from the employer side to social and health insurance, etc. The delivery partners also incur a lot of costs. (…) The precarization of work via the Amazon warehouses is different. The overwhelming majority of the approximately 840,000 workers directly employed by Amazon perform standard, monotonous jobs and receive the lowest social security benefits permitted by law. They often have no protection against dismissal, unlimited working hours, extremely precarious conditions at work and no works councils or union co-determination. (…) Given the extremely precarious hourly wages and the devastating working conditions that have been repeatedly described, free drinks (water, coffee, tea) and success-related bonuses are intended to entice people. The bonuses in the event of “corresponding goal achievement” mean nothing other than piecework. (…)Attacks on workers’ mental health and undermining their union activity are among the foundations of success and at the core of Amazon’s strategy. Amazon is specifically building its logistics centers in places with above-average unemployment in order to increase the pressure on employees. Colleagues also report a climate of denunciation and total surveillance…”Excerpt from Niklas Hoves' dossier as a preprint in Junge Welt from December 21, 2020
- See the dossier:International ethecon Awards 2020: Dead Planet Award to Amazon – digital insult from Jeffrey Bezos on November 21st, 2020
Kiva, Fetch and Freight. Automation in the logistics industry is advancing. It's about storage capacity, cost efficiency - and the future of employees
“Amazon is always in the headlines because of the labor dispute by the ver.di union over a better collective agreement. Working conditions at the mail order company are also often an issue. However, the group is also known, and this is certainly related, for its policy of cost reduction through automation. This doesn't always work the way Amazon would like. But the development is unstoppable. We will have to see what consequences this has for employees…”Article by Vincent Körner from May 30, 2015 in Neues Deutschland online . From the text: “…The company says that so far no employee has been fired because of the use of robots - their machine colleagues cannot do the complicated tasks. Not yet, as one could say with regard to the “Picking Challenge” and new developments such as Fetch and Freight. The industry estimates that robots could potentially replace 25,000 human workers…”

They call it leisure
"Ten years ago, Amazon ushered in a new dynamic of exploitation with its Mechanical Turk platform. Organized resistance is only gradually gaining momentum…”Article by Thomas Wagner in Junge Welt from May 26, 2015 . From the text: “…The global mail order company launched a very special website in 2005. It's called Mechanical Turk and was supposed to help Amazon trade CDs. Since the computers at the time were not yet able to check the product information sufficiently efficiently, human labor was used as “artificial artificial intelligence”. This resulted in a work platform for such small jobs, so-called Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT), which cannot be carried out by computers. The type of job placement carried out on now established platforms such as Mechanical Turk or Clickworker is known as crowdsourcing. Workers who make their living this way call themselves Turkers. Today there are said to be 500,000 people from 190 countries on Amazon alone. Those who take on the microtasks offered delete porn photos from image databases, type up business cards, test websites or take on manageable programming tasks…”
Crowdwork: How click workers organize themselves
“The Amazon platform “Mechanical Turk” is the most prominent example of crowdwork. It's not the only thing. In Germany too, hundreds of thousands of people earn their money on online platforms. A book is now moving the debate forward…”Article by Jeannette Goddar in the HBS magazine Codetermination Issue 12/2014

Automation in the logistics industry using Amazon as an example

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