Recently, Amazon has been in the hot seat on a number of fronts. There have been strikes at their warehouses because of their labor practices; lots of break-up talk from Elizabeth Warren about them being too big and powerful; soundings by the U.K. government about a digital services tax and other measures to counter their highly efficient tax strategy (and those of other tech giants). Meantime, the disrupted smaller bricks-and-mortar retailers are deeply upset at Amazon for eating their lunch; and even consumers, who have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for buying from the internet colossus, seem to harbor mixed feelings toward them.
Amazon has recently announced that the company is rolling out a series of initiatives around Inclusive Capitalism, that of upskilling its own workers. Having disrupted retailing and created a new asset class of huge, highly automated distribution warehouses, the company’s move may be a first step towards revolutionizing the approach to in-work skills training.
In our current tech age characterized by great workplace mobility, companies can’t guarantee a job for life, but they can impart skills that last a lifetime. One British company, Severn Trent Water, prides itself on its training and apprenticeship programs, as its CEO Liv Garfield strives to keep the 40-year-old utility company’s workforce moving squarely into the 21st Century.
These days, virtually every conversation about the changing workplace centers around the question: With all these jobs being replaced by robots, what will people do for work? Back in 2017, before AI was truly in the vernacular, management consultant A.T. Kearney predicted that automation would put a million jobs at risk in the U.S., India, Poland and the Philippines alone—and that only one new position would be created for every four of these lost jobs. This seems to contradict the present situation in the U.S. wherein for the first time, there are more job openings than people to fill them, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the majority of these unfilled positions are for low-skilled workers in areas like hospitality, healthcare, and retail—low-paid positions that normally don’t depend on a high level of education. We see a similar situation in the U.K.
Meanwhile, the jobs that hold out the promise of upward mobility through technology, while fewer in number, supposedly don’t have enough trained American workers to fill them. But is this really so? Reports like this one claim that high-tech jobs are instead being filled by immigrants on H-1B visas, at a much lower cost to companies than hiring U.S. workers. Indeed, the EU has seen a parallel inflow of skilled workers from Turkey, while India has forged a highly trained workforce that is forming the backbone of its new middle class, when workers aren’t headed to a country willing to pay them even better. In the current U.S. political climate, tougher immigration laws seem to point toward the need to train and keep Americans working. In order to maintain the U.S.’s competitive technology edge, real efforts toward upskilling its workforce must happen.
Amazon is doing something about the need to nurture those higher skill levels, on a scale that can definitely be termed inclusive. In its recently announced Upskilling 2025 initiative, the tech giant is pledging to offer 100,000 of its U.S. employees access to six different training programs that will give them a real step up the technological and economic ladder—two qualifiers that increasingly go hand in hand—in the next 6 years. After launching its Future Engineers computer science program for disadvantaged school-aged kids late last fall, Amazon is now turning its attention to helping its own workforce, present and future, acquire the necessary knowledge and tools to move into higher skilled roles, within the company and even beyond.
In parallel with Amazon’s need for highly skilled employees in retail tech, manufacturing companies struggle to fill the 3.5 million available manufacturing positions—one report estimates that 2 million of those jobs will remain unfilled due to a skills gap. Some of these jobs—data scientist, solutions architect, security engineer, business analyst—may entail the very same skills Amazon is pledging to teach their employees. But the underlying recognition is that the work itself is very different than it has been. Perhaps since the first Industrial Revolution, no other generation has had to face such a fundamentally changed reality in what they’re actually doing for their jobs. While in the days when trade unions had more power to improve outcomes for workers, they fought for more money for less (fewer hours of) work, our new paradigm opens up the opportunity to earn more money for upskilled work.
Government has been talking about the need to retrain people, but Amazon’s Upskilling 2025 initiative seems to be the first instance of it actually happening en masse, spearheaded by business, to boot. Opening the opportunity for 100,000 people to earn higher wages creates a very real tide in upward mobility. In a sense, this initiative throws down the gauntlet to other companies to do their part, too, in retraining the American workforce in highly technological but not necessarily company-specific proficiencies. If 10 companies could do something like this, that would be a million more skilled people to add to the American workforce. Could this be the beginning of a new middle class in the stratified U.S.?
This column would be incomplete without bringing it back around to my criteria for inclusive capitalism. Amazon’s initiative certainly exemplifies how big business can invest in raising the level of as many people as possible. It is a forward-looking, long-term project that will not only retrain Amazon’s own employees but will help them in future jobs they may secure—a nod to the reality of the impermanent gig economy that has emerged. So even as Amazon is in the line of fire coming at it from multiple quadrants, they are also demonstrating that it’s possible for Big Business to invest in such a way as to increase the prospects of the largest number of people possible and engender inclusive growth. Upskilling 2025 deserves acknowledgement and gains a place in our ledger of Inclusive Capitalism.
