Your grandpa wouldn't have been impressed by Amazon's plan to retrain workers. Neither should you.

Amazon workers are going back to school — and the midcentury model of labor

Amazon workers.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Scott Olson/Getty Images, FreeSoulProduction/iStock)

Amazon workers are going back to school. Last week, the e-commerce behemoth announced a new $700 million program to retrain 100,000 of its 300,000 American employees by 2025. The training will be available to employees at all levels of the company's supply chain. "[Amazon's] new program aims to move a large swath of workers up one or two rungs on the skills ladder," The New York Times explained, "turning warehouse floor workers into IT technicians and low-level coders into data scientists."

Given how often we're told that robots are coming for Americans' jobs, and that more skills are the route to higher wages, this would seem like welcome news. And to an extent, it is. But the fact that Amazon's announcement is news-worthy at all — as opposed to business-as-usual — is dramatic proof of how far off track our economy has gotten.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.