Fast deliveries worsen conditions for e-commerce warehouse workers

Holding off on that late-night online order of a book, blender or blue jeans could ease the strain on a warehouse worker.

Consumers' around-the-clock, often impulsive demand for cheap, rapidly delivered products creates harsher working conditions in e-commerce fulfillment centers than in traditional warehouses, according to Cornell-led research that provides the first comprehensive assessment of e-commerce work in the U.S.

Between Amazon and Walmart, the nation's two largest warehouse employers, surveys found jobs at Amazon fulfillment centers to be significantly worse - more intense and dangerous - likely driven by the e-commerce market leader's emphasis on fast delivery.

The findings are cause for concern if Amazon's practices become the norm, the researchers said - but also show alternative approaches are viable.

"E-commerce heightens the frenzy among retailers to satisfy customers with convenience, speed and cheap prices, offerings that all erode job quality for workers behind the scenes," said Alexander Kowalski, assistant professor of human resources studies in the ILR School. "This is a problematic trend for a large and growing share of the labor market - but it doesn't have to be this way."

Kowalski is the first author of "At the Mercy of the Market: E-Commerce and Warehouse Work in the United States," published May 19 in the ILR Review. Co-authors are Sanjay Pinto and Beth Gutelius, senior research fellows at the University of Illinois-Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development; and Steven Vallas, professor emeritus of sociology at Northeastern University.

In related papers, Kowalski has found shortcomings in so-called "collaborative robots" being deployed in e-commerce warehouses, and that a program giving e-commerce workers more of a voice improved their well-being.

Research about the workers who enable e-commerce has highlighted reasons such jobs may be more challenging: They involve more varied inventory, more intensive labor, less predictable demand and more frequent returns. In response, workers including material movers, pickers, packers and clerks earn low wages and may face unpredictable schedules, monotonous tasks, limited opportunities for breaks, digital surveillance and discipline imposed by algorithms.

Research, however, has largely focused on Amazon, leaving it unclear whether job quality there represented warehousing broadly, the e-commerce sector or a particular corporate strategy. To address that question, Kowalski's team first sought to establish a big-picture view of U.S. warehouse work, which has not been documented comprehensively despite enormous growth - tripling over the past 20 years, as e-commerce increased to 16.4% of retail sales.

The team surveyed about 400 hourly employees representative of the U.S. population of warehouse workers. Some supported e-commerce fulfillment centers primarily reacting to consumer orders, called business-to-consumer (B2C) warehouses; others worked in distribution and sorting centers serving brick-and-mortar stores or manufacturers, called business-to-business (B2B) warehouses.

The results confirmed a "B2C Effect": Warehouse jobs were challenging on average, but worse at B2C - largely e-commerce - sites. Those workers experienced more pressure to move quickly and avoid taking breaks, greater exposure to unsafe situations and significantly worse overall well-being - a measure of anxiety, burnout and stress - but were not paid more.

"The warehouse segment dedicated to e-commerce offers lower-quality jobs across the board," Kowalski said. "The results suggest that more time-sensitive pressures related to speedy delivery make for especially low-quality jobs in e-commerce."

To investigate if those issues were consistent across retailers, the researchers next surveyed warehouse employees at Amazon (1,450 respondents) and Walmart (450 respondents), which respectively accounted for 38% and 6% of U.S. online shopping in 2023.

The results showed Amazon's fulfillment centers housed the least desirable warehousing jobs. Respondents working in those facilities were more likely to report higher intensity, less opportunity, lower wages, greater unfairness and more challenges concerning safety, well-being and injuries. Walmart's baseline job was not high-quality but varied little by warehouse type, whereas Amazon's e-commerce jobs - the majority of its warehouse workforce - were significantly worse than comparable Walmart jobs, the researchers said. The findings suggest Walmart's emphasis on low prices imposes less burden on e-commerce warehouse workers than Amazon's focus on delivery speed.

"E-commerce creates downward pressure on work conditions," Kowalski said, "and Amazon dials it up even more."

The contrast between e-commerce's biggest players, however, implies that Amazon's lower job quality is not inevitable, but flows from its strategic priorities. Improving job quality will require worker movements, regulatory policies, consumer awareness and businesses seeing value in doing things differently, the researchers said. Kowalski pointed to his research showing better outcomes when workers are more involved in decision-making as further evidence that e-commerce can be managed less punitively.

"We are going down a path that should be worrisome for workers and for consumers alike," he said. "But if there is a silver lining, it's that one can arrange e-commerce operations in a way that shifts some of the burden off of workers. Now it's up to companies to choose to do things that way."