In the early morning hours of October 12, 2020, 27-year-old Jang Deok-joon returned home from his night shift at South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang and immediately jumped into the bath. Chan worked at the company's warehouse in the southern city of Daegu for just over a year. Their job is to transport crates full of goods to be shipped to distribution points. Concerned that he had not come out of the bathroom for more than an hour and a half, his father opened the door and found Chan unconscious in the bath. Chan was curled up with his arms wrapped around his chest. He was rushed to the hospital, but had no pulse or breathing, and was pronounced dead by a doctor at 9:09 am. The cause of death, determined by the coroner, was a heart attack.
I focused on this story because Chan was the third Coupang worker to die in 2020. Chan's death has only compounded concerns about the nature of the company's success. And Coupang is a phenomenally successful company. In just a few years, it has grown to become the third largest company in terms of employment among Korean companies. Leveraging a vast network of warehouses, a workforce of 37,000 employees, a fleet of drivers and a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, it has achieved a dominant position in the highly competitive South Korean e-commerce market. Coupangs are everywhere in South Korea. Half of the population has downloaded the company's app, and its "rocket delivery" service (99.3% of orders are delivered within 24 hours, the company claims) has earned it the reputation of "surpassing even Amazon." .
The use of AI to reduce coupon delivery times is particularly surprising. After all, the company's own algorithms calculate everything from the most efficient way to load parcels onto delivery trucks to the exact route and order of deliveries for drivers. At the warehouse, AI predicts purchases and calculates deadlines for outbound shipments. The system allows Coupang to promise to deliver millions of items, from 60-cent face masks to $9,000 cameras, all within a day. These innovations are why Coupang proudly bills itself as the “future of e-commerce,” and are the driving force behind its recent listing on NASDAQ at an $84 billion valuation. The $84 billion is the largest US initial public offering (IPO) by an Asian company since Alibaba in 2014.
But what does all this innovation and efficiency mean for Coupang workers?
That was a question I had before Chan's death last summer. That question arose when I met Coupang's warehouse workers and delivery men. Chan reportedly told his mother that workers were treated like "disposable tools". All the workers I met experienced the dehumanizing effects of Coupang's algorithmic innovations. One person described the ferocious pace of work. Workers are expected to deliver in superhuman delivery times. Some even found it difficult to go to the bathroom while working. When Coupang launched its on-demand delivery service, Rocket Delivery, in 2014, Coupang promised even the lowest-tier workers a stable career with above-average benefits. Somewhere along the way, however, workers seem to have had to become what South Korean labor journalist Kim Ha-young calls “the limbs of the AI.”
It is no coincidence that many of these criticisms mirror what has been reported about working conditions at Amazon. Coupang was founded in 2010 as a Groupon-like discount platform, but in 2014 switched to an Amazon-style vertically integrated fulfillment model. He vowed to become the “Amazon of Korea.” Along the way, Coupang ran into exactly the same labor problems as Amazon.
Tough on-demand jobs
Rocket delivery works because of certainty. In other words, to deliver to customers on time. The promise is that Coupang's algorithms will determine exactly when a shipment must leave the warehouse. At the company's warehouses, these shipping deadlines come about every two hours.
“I found that the only priority was meeting deadlines for rocket deliveries,” says Go Gong, a former warehouse worker. "We were just robots," he says. Ngo took medical leave in May 2020 to take time off from work at Coupang. While running to meet the deadline, I tore my left hamstring. Go has since been fired.
Like Amazon, Coupang used a metric called "Unit-per-hour (UPH)." It's a real-time measure of employee productivity and a metric for maintaining a grueling pace in the warehouse. Workers are officially given one hour of rest for every eight-hour shift (which is the legal minimum), but a driver I met last September told me: Most people continue to work even during breaks. Otherwise, the schedule cannot be kept. This driver no longer works for Coupang. A Coupang spokesperson said in an emailed statement to MIT Technology Review that it no longer tracks UPH in its warehouses. But some warehouse managers still openly monitor efficiency in this way, according to active workers I spoke to recently. "UPH is a term that's mostly obsolete, but people still yell at it for being too slow. I think it's probably based on some concrete evidence."
As the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) spread, Coupang made big profits, but its obsessive fixation on efficiency took more and more victims. Between 2019 and 2020, Coupang and its warehouses nearly doubled the number of work-related injuries to 982. After Chan's heart attack death, three more c…