Re:Amazon asks workers sheltering at home to return or reque...
by tracker1 on Friday April 24, 2020 @04:55PM
(#22972814)
Frankly, I'm quite surprised Amazon, FedEx, UPS and USPS have done as well as they have under these conditions.
Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.
Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.
Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.
Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.
Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.
Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.