I’ve been inside Amazon’s new hi-tech warehouses – and I’ve seen how robots will change how we work

I recently visited an Amazon fulfilment centre in Tilbury, Essex. LCY2, as it is called, is a “ninth generation” site, meaning it is the company’s most up-to-date, and is operated 24 hours a day by workers and robots across a 2 million sq ft warehouse – around 28 football pitches.

There have been a lot of changes since Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, who started the company shipping books from his garage in Seattle. Since then, the company has grown dramatically, shipping what feels like just about anything to homes worldwide. In the process, Bezos became the richest person in the world, with a net worth of over $100bn.

However, LCY2 tells a different story about Amazon. It is part of two important networks that the company has established. The first is the fulfilment network that allows Amazon to deliver physical goods the next day – or in some cases in under two hours. This has required the creation of huge physical infrastructure: Amazon operates 150 million sq ft across 175 warehouses. The second is Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing infrastructure that many other companies run their services on.

It is this combination of physical and digital networks that LCY2 represents. There are 3,000 workers at the warehouse, but they could not do their job without the 16 miles of conveyor belts and thousands of Kiva robots. The centre of the warehouse is accessible only to these robots, cordoned off with fencing. These flat, orange robots lift around 8,000 towers of shelves, shuffling them around the floor.

This system means that workers rely on algorithmically driven processes. They stand at access points in the chain-linked fence either putting items in or taking them out. Although the tour guide explains the robots are perfectly safe – it’s an “EU regulation” to have the fence – it does feel like two worlds being separated here. It is hard to see what is happening through the fence as there are no lights in the centre of the warehouse. We were shown a live-feed representation of the warehouse floor on an Amazon-branded Kindle, buzzing with disembodied and automated activity.

When an item is brought to the warehouse, a “sorter” stands at an access point scans it and puts it into a stack, which then disappears back into the centre of the warehouse. The opposite happens when a customer makes an order. A “picker” places the item into a plastic tray, which shoots off on a conveyor belt to be boxed and sent. They are expected to pick an item every nine seconds.

Unlike the dark floor that the robots work on, the human side is flooded with fluorescent light and plastered with motivational posters and disciplinary reminders. At the entrance to the warehouse, workers have to move through metal detectors and it feels like this surveillance continues throughout the site.

On the tour, much is made of pay rates being £10.50 an hour. This means it comes in just under the London Living Wage – that is actually being able to meet the costs of living – despite the fact many workers are bussed in from east London. The agencies Adecco and PMP are actively recruiting to Amazon – showing that despite the robots, people are still in high demand here. In fact, at one point during the tour, the guide notes how they are not trying to replace people at sites like these, just make them considerably more productive.

For workers, this extra productivity looks very isolating. The access points are spaced too far apart for them to talk. The warehouse floor has a constant low hum like a factory, with a not-quite-finished feel of unpainted concrete and scaffolding. It feels like the place is in flux, that further technological changes are just a management decision away.

Unsurprisingly, many aspects of the work are hidden from tour visitors. There was no direct evidence of the “timed toilet breaks, impossible targets and exhausting, ‘intolerable’ working conditions,” as detailed by the undercover journalist Alan Selby. However, when asked about working conditions, the tour guides had a quick answer – to paraphrase – “yes we’ve been described as running Victorian workhouses, that’s why we’re transparent now – you can come on the tour and see yourself”.

It is clear from walking the floors of the warehouse that low-paid work is being transformed. Thousands of workers are finding themselves pulled into vast fields of warehouses. Rather than being replaced by robots, the pace of their work is being greatly accelerated by working alongside them. Even in a ninth generation version, the warehouse could not operate without humans. Clearly, these workers form a key backbone of the contemporary economy, but do not get anywhere near a fair share of the benefits – quite unlike Jeff Bezos.