美国国家公共电台 NPR Online Retail Boom Means More Warehouse Workers, And Robots To Accompany Them

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There's a good chance something you've purchased once passed through the hands of a picker. These are the warehouse 1 workers who pick, pack and ship to us all those products we order online. We'll learn more about them and the challenges they face from automation on this week's All Tech Considered.

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CORNISH: From member station KQED we have two stories. First up, reporter Sam Harnett takes us to a distribution hub on the outskirts 2 of the Bay Area.

SAM HARNETT, BYLINE 3: Patterson High School is about two hours east of San Francisco. It's surrounded by the farmland of California's Central Valley, which produces half of the country's fruits, vegetables and nuts. But this group of students isn't learning how to be farmers. They're training to work in warehouses 4.

HILARIO GARCIA: So let's do some driving. Drive right there, forward and backwards 5 driving.

HARNETT: Teacher Hilario Garcia is instructing a student perched on a virtual reality forklift simulator.

JUSTIN LOCKHART: It's fun. It makes class really fun.

HARNETT: The machine's part of a whole mock warehouse the school built for vocational courses to train students like Justin Lockhart.

JUSTIN: And it's just a course that's kind of nice, especially in the town we're at where it was just all once farming, has now turned into a big logistics and distribution center out there. You got Amazon.

HARNETT: Amazon is one of a dozen distribution centers just down the road. The county here has struggled with unemployment. But since 2000 warehouse and transport jobs have more than doubled from 4,000 to over 9,000. Those workers keep the stream of items flowing to customers, most of whom are in the richer urban areas to the north and west. At this CVS distribution center, Mariela Zepeda's nimble fingers snag everything from bottles of pills to boxes of condoms. Zepeda has to move quickly to ship these orders. The company tracks her progress.

MARIELA ZEPEDA: It's heavy work, but it definitely beats fast food chains or anything like that.

HARNETT: For one, pay is better. Zepeda, who's also a part-time college student, says she makes $14.79 an hour. Companies advertise entry-level wages of $11 to $14, sometimes with benefits. It's a good start, Zepeda says, but it isn't the kind of job you can support a family with, not in Patterson. It's close to the Bay Area, which means housing isn't cheap.

ZEPEDA: Me by myself, like, no kids, like, no nothing, maybe I could get by. But I don't know, if you're trying to, like, feed a family, I - no, definitely no. I don't think so. I think a lot of places are like that, too.

SHELLEY BURCHAM: We know that there are citizens that require these entry-level jobs or, you know, that's their skill set. But we want to kind of up the game.

HARNETT: Shelley Burcham is the economic development manager for Tracy. It's another distribution hub about 30 minutes north of Patterson. Burcham wants jobs Tracy can build a community around. Jobs that pay enough for people to own a house and raise a family here, jobs in industries like tech and high-skilled manufacturing. Right now most people who live in Tracy don't work here.

BURCHAM: About 70 percent of our resident workforce 6 actually commutes 7 out of Tracy every day.

HARNETT: Do you know where most of them go?

BURCHAM: They go to the Bay Area.

HARNETT: Patterson and Tracy are just two of many small towns that have become distribution hubs to feed wealthier urban centers. There's union outside of New York City, Riverside by Los Angeles and many others. While companies continue to hire human pickers for their warehouses, they're also automating 8 the work. For NPR News, I'm Sam Harnett of KQED. And now I'm passing off to my colleague Queena Kim, who will tell us what those robots are doing and what they're not.

QUEENA KIM, BYLINE: The Amazon fulfillment center is huge. It's about 1 million square feet. And the best way to describe the experience is it's like walking through a ginormous machine.

ASHLEY ROBINSON: It's the conveyance 10 (unintelligible).

KIM: I know you can barely hear her, but that's Ashley Robinson. She's an Amazon spokesperson. And what she's saying is that noise, it's the conveyance, or what most people call conveyor belts.

ROBINSON: And we've got miles of conveyance here in this facility.

KIM: In front of us, three stories of conveyor belts moving an endless stream of yellow plastic boxes carrying customers' stuff. At a lot of warehouses humans still move things, but here it's mostly been automated 11.

ROBINSON: It's all part of the symphony of Amazon fulfillment.

KIM: The conductor of that symphony - a computer. It keeps track of every item in the warehouse with the goal of getting stuff to you, the consumer, as quickly as possible.

ROBINSON: These are the Amazon robots. They're orange, square-shaped.

KIM: The robots look like huge hockey pucks, like 3-feet-wide hockey pucks. The robots' job - to fetch the stuff customers order online. To do this, the robots glide 12 around the warehouse through a labyrinth 13 of thousands of portable storage units, the shelves crammed 14 with a random 15 assortment 16 of stuff - books, paper towels, board games.

ROBINSON: I'm seeing some bottles of vitamins. It looks like there are some ink cartridges 17 for printers. I'm seeing a zombie bobblehead toy up there.

KIM: When the robot finds its storage unit, it glides 18 underneath 19 and lifts it up, and then delivers it to a human worker. They're called pickers. On the day I was there the computer told the picker to grab what looked like a fantasy board game. The picker found it, scanned it and placed it on the conveyor belt.

ROBINSON: So in a traditional fulfillment center where the associate would walk to the different items it can take hours to fulfill 9 a customer order. With the robotics it can take minutes.

KIM: So is this a sign we're entering a new industrial revolution? Karen Myers is a scientist at SRI, one of Silicon 20 Valley's oldest research centers. And I asked her - what could we expect from this next big shift?

KAREN MYERS: It's definitely going to take over a lot of jobs.

KIM: At the same time, she says, we're running up against the limits of technology, too. Take the picker at the Amazon fulfillment center. Myers says those skills are proving to be uniquely human.

MYERS: Our fingers are incredibly dexterous 21. And the current generation of robotic manipulators, they're getting much, much better, but they're just not quite there yet.

KIM: There's also the robot's brain. You remember that board game the Amazon picker was looking for? It was on its side crammed into the shelf. The picker could barely see the box, but she could tell it was a board game. Robots can't do that. Technologists say instead of humans or robots, more and more we will work side by side. Amazon says robots and humans enable the Tracy warehouse to fulfill customer orders faster. That means more customers and more human workers - at least for now. For NPR News, I'm Queena Kim.

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And Amazon, we should say, is one of NPR's financial supporters.

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