Lehigh Valley: how the steel region has become the capital of e-commerce

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The Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, consisting of three cities: Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, was one of the centers of steel production in the United States in the twentieth century, but after the decline of this industry, the region suffered from economic problems and high unemployment, which reached 2010%.

Now everything has changed, the valley has become the center of electronic commerce, there are huge warehouses here. Amazon and WalMart, which allowed to employ almost all the working population of the region, writes The Outline.

According to authorities, the number of jobs in e-commerce in the valley has increased by 13,8% over the past 5 years.

The location for the warehouses was not chosen by the online sales giants by chance - the main highways leading to the west, east, south and north of the United States pass through the valley, so it is very convenient to deliver to anywhere in the country from this region. The Valley is logistically in the heart of the East Coast, where 40% of all American shoppers live.

However, new jobs are not as well paid and not as stable as they were in the steel industry.

In 1930-1940's, the company Bethlehem steel It was the largest employer in the region, 300 000 people worked for it. Its executive director Arthur Homer was the highest paid manager in the country. In the 1970s, the salary of a worker of this company was more than 13 US dollars per hour, which is about 35 dollars per hour in terms of the current value of the dollar, adjusted for inflation. Employees received generous pensions and benefits, but later the company could not stand the competition of Japan and Germany using the latest technology.

In Lehigh District Amazon Now it is the third largest employer, with three warehouses located in the region. Distribution Center Walmart for online sales located in Bethlehem. Company FedEx plans to start work in the region in 2017, opening its largest facility in the United States in Allentown, where 600 people will work, providing 75 processing 000 orders per hour. This facility will be built at Lehigh Valley Airport, where three of the five cargo compartments are reserved for Amazon. In the next two years, the airport plans to double the number of cargo compartments, increasing their number to 10 in order to cope with the influx of goods related to electronic commerce and its warehouses in the region.

The warehouse and e-commerce sector in Lehigh Valley employs 14 410 people, which is only a small part of the people who were employed in the steel industry. Remuneration at these jobs is also much lower than that of steel workers. AT Amazon, warehouse workers receive from 12 to 14 dollars per hour. Although work in a warehouse is certainly less dangerous than in a steel mill, it is also quite exhausting.

Additionally, Amazon very strictly applies to employees, exposing for them the norms of the number of packages that they must remove from the shelf and deliver to sorting machines within a certain period of time. Failure to comply with these standards may lead to dismissal.

In addition, these jobs can quickly disappear due to the automation revolution in the United States, when many workers can simply be replaced by robots.

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