Hand packers and packagers
Official title Packers and Packagers, Hand (SOC 53-7064)
Also called Packer, Packager, Bagger, Sacker, Hand packer
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 559,820 US hand packers and packagers, with median pay of $36,280 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 901,890, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 80,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for hand packers and packagers: Amazon Kiva + AutoStore grid + automated cartonizers, 2012 to 2022.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to decline 5% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 10% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.38 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.38. BLS counted 672,020 of these jobs in May 2013 and 559,820 in May 2025 (-17%, a change derived by Future History).
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Hand packers and packagers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7064
Future History. "Hand packers and packagers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7064.
@misc{futurehistory_53_7064, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Hand packers and packagers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7064}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $35,350 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
Upton Sinclair publishes 'The Jungle': his expose of the meatpacking industry in Chicago's Back of the Yards district. Sinclair intended to expose the exploitation of immigrant workers, most of whom performed hand-packing and processing work in Armour, Swift, and Morris packing houses. What the public remembered was the food safety horror: contaminated meat products packed and shipped to American consumers. The book's immediate political consequence is the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906): the first federal regulation of what goes into a package before it ships. The longer-term consequence for the occupation: packaging standards, including labeling requirements, began their century-long escalation under federal regulatory authority, making the packer's work increasingly specification-driven.
Sealed Air Corporation is founded and files a patent for a new plastic material with air trapped in bubbles between two sheets, eventually marketed as Bubble Wrap. The material was initially conceived as textured wallpaper, then briefly sold as greenhouse insulation, before a packaging engineer at IBM recognized its value as shock-absorbing protective packaging for the IBM 1401 computer. Bubble Wrap became the dominant fragile-item void-fill material in US fulfillment and shipping operations, and created a multi-hundred-million-dollar product line that Sealed Air would later automate the manufacture of, changing the packer's role from hand-cutting cushioning material to loading automated dispensers.
June 26, 1974 (NB: barcode invention predates, standardization follows): the Universal Product Code is first scanned commercially at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, a 10-pack of Wrigley's chewing gum. The UPC transforms the packer's station over the following decade: where labels had been hand-written or typed and pasted, now a label printer at the packing station outputs a machine-readable barcode that connects the package to an electronic record of its contents, destination, and price. The barcode makes outbound packing accuracy auditable for the first time, a scan mismatch stops the pack process, and lays the groundwork for the scan-verify-pack workflows that become standard in e-commerce fulfillment centers from the 1990s onward.
Amazon opens its first two large fulfillment centers (in Seattle and New Castle, Delaware) establishing the packing-station assembly line as the core of e-commerce order fulfillment. Each packing station is a simple workbench: a scanner, a label printer, a tape gun, and a supply of void-fill material. A worker scans each item, places it in a box sized by the WMS, fills void space, seals, prints a label, and sends the box to the conveyor. Amazon's earliest FCs were essentially 1908 Sears operations with barcode scanners in place of handwritten manifests. By 2024, Amazon would be operating approximately 200+ US fulfillment centers, employing hundreds of thousands of packing-station workers as the single largest employer of hand packers in the United States.
Frey & Osborne (2013) publish "The Future of Employment" at Oxford, assigning SOC 53-7064 Packers and Packagers, Hand a probability of computerization of 0.98: the single highest value in their 702-occupation dataset. The result makes intuitive sense: packing a known object into a known container in a known sequence is exactly what automation does. The prediction is partially vindicated in standardized environments (form-fill-seal machines, blister-pack lines, automated cartonizers) and dramatically wrong at the aggregate level, because the e-commerce volume surge of 2013-2024 created more total packing demand than any contemporary estimate of automation adoption could absorb. The 53-7064 result is the definitive empirical test of F&O's methodology: highest technical susceptibility, lowest actual displacement rate, because the prediction did not model demand elasticity.
March-April 2020: COVID-19 lockdowns drive a 44.5% year-over-year surge in US e-commerce sales in Q2 2020. Amazon hires 175,000 workers in a matter of weeks. Packing-station workers are designated essential workers and continue reporting to fulfillment centers during national lockdowns. The surge is the largest single-quarter test of whether e-commerce packing automation has reached a level where human workers can be substituted, and the answer, unambiguously, is no: Amazon cannot manufacture or deploy Kiva robots fast enough to meet the demand surge, and the packing-station work remains human-dependent. Simultaneously, the labor-rights dimension of the occupation becomes a major news story as packing workers report inadequate PPE, speed-up pressure in productivity monitoring, and insufficient sick-leave protections at Amazon's FC network.
November 2022: Amazon publicly announces Sparrow, its first robot designed to handle individual product items at the pick-and-pack interface, using computer vision and adaptive grasping to route items from totes to packing stations. Amazon states Sparrow can handle approximately 65% of the products in its catalog at deployed sites. The announcement marks the beginning of the direct-automation phase for packing-station work, not just automating transport (what Kiva did) but automating the hand-to-package contact itself. As of 2026, Sparrow is in limited deployment across Amazon's FC network, with the 35% of SKUs that cannot be handled remaining the stable core of the human packing-station workforce.
BLS OEWS counts 601,440 wage-and-salary workers in SOC 53-7064 in 2024 (the BLS OOH all-jobs baseline for the 2024-34 projections is about 697,000), despite decades of automation investment from case-erectors (1957) through form-fill-seal (1960s), blister-pack (1960s), goods-to-person robotics (2012-), and AI vision picking (2022-). The F&O (2013) probability of 0.98, the most extreme automation prediction for any US occupation, has been empirically tested against a decade of observed data: OEWS employment went from 672,020 in 2013 to 601,440 in 2024, a decline of roughly 10%, not a collapse. The occupation is the clearest demonstration in the US economy that technical automation potential and actual employment displacement are different things: if demand grows fast enough, the robots change the job without ending it.
Will AI replace hand packers and packagers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for hand packers and packagers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is taking this onPlace products, components, or materials into containers by hand, applying judgment about orientation, fragility, and fit for products whose dimensions or surfaces defeat automated gripper systems.
Place products, components, or materials into containers by hand, applying judgment about orientation, fragility, and fit for products whose dimensions or surfaces defeat automated gripper systems.[3],[1]
Focus on product categories that resist gripper automation: fragile glass, irregular shapes, mixed SKU orders, and delicate artisan goods. Volunteer for changeover setups and specialty runs where human adaptability outpaces machine reconfiguration time.
AI is sitting alongside you hereSeal containers using tape guns, glue, heat-sealing tools, or banding equipment
Seal containers using tape guns, glue, heat-sealing tools, or banding equipment; identify seal failures and reprocess non-conforming packages before they enter the shipping stream.[1]
Develop speed and consistency on manual sealing as a quality checkpoint role: catching mis-sealed or under-filled packages before downstream automation flags them as defects is a value-add that reduces rework costs.
AI is sitting alongside you hereWeigh, measure, and count products to verify fill targets using scales or counting devices
Weigh, measure, and count products to verify fill targets using scales or counting devices; resolve catch-weight exceptions for variable-weight items and document variance from nominal specifications.[1]
Learn to operate and calibrate the checkweigher or counting equipment on your line. Workers who understand the calibration procedure and can clear jam states quickly are valued as more than packers: they keep the line running.
Where hand packers and packagers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks
- US median pay
- $45,260 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -7.6%
- First-Line Supervisors of Production and Operating Workers
- US median pay
- $74,450 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +1.8%
- Inspectors, Testers, Sorters, Samplers, and Weighers
- US median pay
- $48,570 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +2.5%
What each move takes
Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks
Packers who become proficient with WMS terminals and barcode scanners already have the core technical skills for a shipping or receiving clerk role. The pivot shifts the work from physical packing toward inventory record-keeping, carrier documentation, and freight coordination -- tasks where a WMS system amplifies human throughput rather than replacing it.
- · WMS proficiency (SAP, Manhattan, or Oracle WMS): receiving, putaway, and cycle count workflows
- · Freight documentation: bills of lading, packing lists, carrier rate shopping
- · Inventory reconciliation and cycle-count procedures
How has the work of hand packers and packagers changed since 1885?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Hand wrapping + tin can solder + wooden crate (pure manual era)
The first industrial packers worked with the materials available: tin cans sealed with soldered lids (the rotary-sealer made this commercially viable by the 1880s); wooden crates built by coopers then hand-packed by workers; paper wrapping secured with string and sealing wax for mail-order shipments. Speed was constrained entirely by the human hand. A skilled cannery packer at a salmon or tomato line could fill and seal hundreds of cans per hour under good conditions. A wrapper in a Sears shipping room might handle many orders per hour for small items. There was no intermediate machinery: the can or box either arrived from the can-maker and tin-smith ready to fill, or the packer assembled it from flat blanks by hand. Quality control was entirely visual: a packer who let a flawed seal or a mis-wrapped parcel pass was responsible. The craft knowledge was real (knowing the correct paper weight for a given item, the appropriate void-fill for fragile goods, the postal regulations for parcel post labeling) but it was invisible to the outside observer.
Effect on the workTotal employment in hand packing grew continuously with the expansion of American food processing and mail-order commerce. No machinery during this era reduced the number of workers needed; product-volume growth translated directly to workforce growth.
Conveyor packing lines (1930s) + paperboard carton (Kieckhefer, 1920s) + cellophane wrap (1930s)
Three packaging innovations of the interwar period reshaped the packer's working environment without eliminating the need for hand labor. The paperboard folding carton, standardized by the 1920s, replaced wooden crates for most consumer goods: lighter, cheaper, and printable with brand graphics. Cellophane (commercialized by DuPont in the US from 1924) gave food packers a transparent wrapping material that let consumers see what they were buying, driving its rapid adoption in bakeries, meat markets, and fresh produce. The moving conveyor line, borrowed from automotive assembly (Ford's Highland Park plant, 1913), was applied to food-packing operations through the 1930s: workers stood at fixed stations on a belt, each performing one packing sub-step. Speed was now set by the belt, not the worker's own pace: an organizational change that made individual productivity visible and measurable for the first time, decades before the WMS-era productivity analytics of warehouse labor. The conveyor also enabled the use of lower-skill workers (each station task was simplified to a repetitive motion): a deskilling move that kept wages low even as throughput rose.
Effect on the workConveyor packing lines increased throughput per plant substantially but also created larger aggregate demand for packers as production scales expanded. The simplified, repetitive station tasks drew more women and seasonal workers into the occupation.
First US automated case erector (1957) + form-fill-seal (1960s) + blister pack (1960s)
The first commercially successful automated case erector, a machine that took flat corrugated blanks and erected and glued them into open shipping cases without human hands, was developed by Hartness International (now ProMach) in the mid-1950s and saw US commercial deployment by 1957. The case erector automated the most physically demanding packing sub-task (opening and gluing a stiff corrugated blank requires significant force) but left the actual product packing inside the case to human hands. The form-fill-seal machine, broadly adopted in the 1960s for granular and powdered products (coffee, flour, sugar, detergent), went further: a single machine formed a bag from film roll, filled it with product, and sealed it, replacing the three-worker team that had previously handled each step. The pharmaceutical blister pack, introduced in the early 1960s, automated the packaging of pills and tablets into sealed aluminum-and-plastic cards: a previously entirely manual operation. These three technologies represent the beginning of the long, still-ongoing process of automating the most standardized packing sub-tasks while leaving mixed, irregular, and high-variety packing to human hands.
Effect on the workForm-fill-seal adoption displaced substantial hand-packing labor in granular-product food manufacturing (coffee, sugar, flour) and pharmaceutical tablet operations through the 1960s. Overall hand-packing employment continued to grow because new product categories and increased total production volume outpaced the displacement.
Sealed Air automated bubble wrap (1970s-80s) + shrink wrap + UPC barcode label (1974)
Sealed Air Corporation, which had invented bubble wrap in 1960 as a textured wallpaper (seriously) before finding its real market as void-fill packaging, automated its production through the 1970s and introduced Instapak foam-in-place systems (1971) that allowed a packer to dispense custom foam cushioning directly into a box with a hand-held gun, replacing pre-cut foam blocks and reducing the skill needed for fragile-item packing. Shrink-wrap tunnel systems (polyolefin film, heat tunnel, conveyor) automated the wrapping of multi-packs and bundled products in consumer goods manufacturing. The UPC barcode, first scanned commercially at a Marsh supermarket on June 26, 1974, transformed the packing station: packers now applied machine-readable labels rather than hand-lettered tags, and the label printer at the packing station became the first digital tool in the packer's day-to-day work. These technologies improved the consistency and speed of individual packing sub-tasks without eliminating the need for the packer who directed product into the package.
Effect on the workAutomation of void-fill dispensing and shrink-wrapping reduced labor content per unit in consumer goods manufacturing, but overall demand for hand packers continued to grow with the expansion of branded packaged consumer goods through the 1980s.
WMS packing-station integration (1990s) + scan-verify-pack + e-commerce mailer standards
The same Warehouse Management System revolution that transformed picking and receiving in the 1990s reached the packing station with scan-verify-pack workflows: a barcode scanner at the packing station confirmed each item before sealing, creating the first digital audit trail for outbound accuracy. This was consequential for e-commerce from the beginning: Amazon's earliest fulfillment centers (first opened 1997) used scan-verify-pack at every outbound packing station as a core operating discipline, each item scanned, weight-verified against expected product weight, and the label printed only on confirmed match. The e-commerce mailer envelope (the polyethylene mailing bag, standardized in the 1990s by Sealed Air's AirCap line and competitors) became the dominant packaging format for soft goods (apparel, books, small electronics) replacing the corrugated box for lower-cube items and substantially changing what a packer's hands touched day-to-day. Pick-and-pack operations (where the packer also picked the item before packing it, combining two roles) became standard in smaller e-commerce operations.
Effect on the workE-commerce growth created substantial new demand for packing-station workers throughout the 2000s, offsetting continued automation displacement in CPG manufacturing packaging. The scan-verify-pack workflow became universal in e-commerce fulfillment, making the packer's accuracy auditable for the first time.
Amazon Kiva (2012) + AutoStore grid (2000s, mass deployment 2010s) + automated cartonizers
Amazon's 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems transformed picking-to-packing workflow by bringing inventory pods to stationary packing workers rather than having workers walk to shelving: the packing station became the end-point of a robot-delivered goods-to-person flow. Packers at Kiva-equipped Amazon FCs now received a stream of robot-delivered pods, extracted items one by one, and packed them at a stationary station at a higher pace than the previous walk-and-pack workflow permitted. AutoStore, the Norwegian automated grid system (first commercial installation 1996, mass global deployment accelerating from the early 2010s), took a different architectural approach: items lived in bins stacked in a dense grid of aluminum rail, retrieved by bin-carrying robots to stationary pick-and-pack ports. By 2024, AutoStore had been installed in more than a thousand sites globally across pharmaceuticals, apparel, e-commerce, and food service: each site replacing traditional shelving aisles with robot-served packing ports. Automated cartonization software (PackSize, Nesting Science) optimized box selection to reduce void fill, cutting packaging material cost, and creating a secondary market for on-demand box-making machines that right-sized corrugated cartons per order, reducing hand-cutting and adjustment by packers.
Effect on the workGoods-to-person systems (Kiva, AutoStore) increased the number of items a packer could process per hour at a given station: studies cited by robotics vendors claim throughput per worker at goods-to-person ports vs. walk-and-pick equivalents. But total e-commerce volume grew faster than per-worker productivity, sustaining overall packing employment.
Amazon Sparrow (2022) + Symbotic case handling (Walmart) + vision-robotic piece picking
Amazon announced its Sparrow robot in November 2022: the first Amazon robotic system designed specifically to handle individual packaged items at the pick-and-pack interface, using computer vision and adaptive grasping. Amazon stated Sparrow could handle a large share of the products in its catalog at deployed sites, routing items to tote-induction stations and freeing human packers for the remaining irregular-SKU mix. Symbotic (NASDAQ: SYM, IPO at $5.5B valuation in 2022) deployed autonomous case-handling robots in Walmart's regional distribution centers, handling case-level packing and palletizing that had previously required human hands. Berkshire Grey, Mujin, and Covariant deployed AI-vision piece-picking systems targeting the pharmaceutical, grocery, and returns-processing packing workflows. The consensus as of 2026: vision robotics handles a large share of SKUs by volume in high-volume standardized environments but cannot economically handle soft-pack goods (apparel, bags), fragile items (glassware, ceramics), and extremely irregular shapes at acceptable cycle times and error rates, the sizeable share of SKUs that account for a disproportionate share of the hand-packer workforce.
Effect on the workBLS projects employment growth for SOC 53-7064 over 2024-2034: flat against the all-occupation average, as automation pressure and e-commerce demand growth roughly offset each other. The occupation remains near hundreds of thousands of workers as of 2024, concentrated in e-commerce FCs and food/CPG processing.
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Browse all rolesPackers and Packagers, Hand employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
United Kingdom (UK SOC 9132)
- Employment, 2025
- 61,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 9132 Packers, bottlers, canners and fillers, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Median pay, 2025
- £25,087, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 9132 Packers, bottlers, canners and fillers, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Australia (ANZSCO 8321)
- Employment, 2025
- 55,100, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 8321 Packers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
- Median pay, 2025
- A$71,032, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,366 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 80,000 | n/a | Est., IPUMS USA Researched context | Report |
| 1940 | 250,000 | n/a | Est., IPUMS USA Researched context | Report |
| 1970 | 380,000 | $5,100 | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS Historical Wage Data (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 520,000 | $13,500 | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2003 | 901,890 | $16,940 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 872,260 | $17,150 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 840,410 | $17,390 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 827,470 | $17,650 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 798,450 | $18,310 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 777,630 | $19,060 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 706,240 | $19,470 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 676,870 | $19,630 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 666,860 | $19,870 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 660,670 | $19,910 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 672,020 | $19,970 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 693,170 | $20,330 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 713,130 | $21,010 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 705,660 | $22,130 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 700,560 | $23,430 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 663,970 | $24,580 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 633,640 | $25,910 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 599,270 | $28,050 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 585,270 | $29,940 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 653,870 | $32,920 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 645,210 | $34,830 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 601,440 | $35,580 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 559,820 | $36,280 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |