Walmart's Future Workforce: Robots and Freelancers
Over the past few weeks, Walmart executives have sketched a picture of the company’s future that features more self-checkouts and a grocery-delivery business—soon escalating to 100 cities from a pilot program in six cities. Personal shoppers will fill plastic totes with avocados and paper towels from Walmart store shelves, and hand off packages to crowdsourced drivers idling in the parking lot. Assembly will be outsourced, too: Workers on Handy, an online marketplace for home services, will mount televisions and assemble furniture.
The Walmart of the future relies more heavily on the gig economy and automation. This is an indication of the fierce competition between Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, and Amazon. A pair of recent studies suggests that it’s also a sign that the U.S. economy is tilting further toward jobs that give workers less market power.
One study, by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Jeff Jacobs and Suresh Naidu of Columbia University, and Siddharth Suri of Microsoft Research, sought to learn whether crowdsourced workers benefit from being able to choose their tasks and hours. The answer matters to a lot of workers. Flexible work arrangements, which include crowdsourcing platforms such as Uber, as well as freelancers and independent contractors, increased about 50 percent from 2005 to 2015. These jobs account for 94 percent—nearly all—of the net employment growth in the United States over that time.
This shift could be good for workers, in theory, if the flexibility of the gig economy lets them switch more easily between employers to take advantage of higher-paying offers. Yet in their analysis of the online-task marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk, the researchers find that this isn’t necessarily happening. MTurk workers, or Turkers, get paid for repetitive tasks, such as tagging objects found in images or verifying restaurant phone numbers. According to the study, Turkers’ wages amount to less than 20 percent of their productivity—in other words, for every dollar of value produced on MTurk, workers receive less than 20 cents. The Turkers’ share compares with a share of 50 cents to 80 cents of every dollar for workers in the U.S. economy as a whole, Naidu says. “This suggests that much of the surplus created by this online labor-market platform is captured by employers,” the researchers write.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/04/walmarts-future-workforce-robots-and-freelancers/557063/
= new reply since forum marked as read
