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Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailer’s service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it.

Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted. […]

In the Inland Empire region of California, for example, Amazon may cycle through every worker who’d be interested in applying for a warehouse job by the end of 2022, the internal report warned. One of the reasons is that Amazon is increasingly finding itself in a bidding war for workers with rivals in the area, which is a key logistics region because it is within a two-hour drive of 20 million potential customers and two of the largest container ports in the US.

“We are hearing a lot of [Amazon] workers say, ‘I can just go across the street to Target or Walmart,’” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-executive director of an Inland Empire nonprofit called the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. Kaoosji added that Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. An Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the US to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers. He also said Amazon had increased hiring bonuses to as much as $3,000 in some geographies.

And internal forecasts showed the situation was dire in Phoenix, Arizona, with Amazon projected to exhaust its entire potential workforce by the end of 2021. The Phoenix metro area has been a key market for Amazon since it opened its first warehouse there in 2007. The company currently operates more than 20 facilities in the region. But attrition at Amazon’s facilities in the area grew from 128 percent in 2019 to 205 percent in 2020, as the pandemic upended labor markets and online shopping boomed, putting pressure on fulfillment center employees.

As a result, Amazon seemed to have reversed, or stopped enforcing, some workplace policies at Phoenix warehouses amid the labor shortage, according to a former manager.

“They were so concerned about attrition and losing people that they rolled back all the policies that us as managers had to enforce,” Michael Garrigan, a former entry-level manager at Amazon warehouses in Phoenix from 2020 to early 2022, told Recode. “There was a joke among the … managers that it didn’t matter what [workers] got written up for because we knew HR was gonna exempt it. It was almost impossible to get fired as a worker.”