Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don’t comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show::Amazon has updated its promotions policy to enforce its office attendance policy.
I kind of don’t get what’s going on here. I’d think your options would be:
a) Go back to the office, or
b) Stop working there
Like you’d either say to your boss “Look, this work from home thing is really important to me, so I need to look for an opportunity where I can continue to do that,” or your boss would say to you “Look, you keep not showing up to work, so we’re gonna let you go.”
It seems like any period where the company says “Okay, everybody back to the office” and some people say “Oh yeah I’m just gonna ignore that” has got to be pretty short-lived, right?
The whole reason that it works is because the company can’t afford to lose everyone who’s not complying.
But promotion blocking seems like a weak move. If returning to office is enough of a workplace issue to be a deal breaker, threatening people with not taking extra responsibilities or challenges seems like a losing proposition. They’re already willing to lose their job over the issue, and you’ve shown that you can’t lose them, so now you’re gonna make it shittier to remain at the company?
And even besides the perspective that promotions are a benefit, many roles are in place for the company’s sake, to stay organised, are they now gonna not fill those? Or only fill them with external applicants?
Or is the idea to only promote the compliant ones? That would make some sense, at least.
I work at AWS (won’t after this Friday since I got a remote job), and while I’m pretty low on the totem pole, internally it is very clear what is going on. Leadership is slowly phasing out non-proximate workers. Why? No one knows really, but our best guess is unofficial layoffs and upholding commercial real estate.
It started with RTO 3 days a week for everyone except remote employees in May. Then in September basically all remote employees were forced to relocate to their team hub. This was as much of a shit show as you think. You were given 30 days to decide and 60 days to move. What people did was “decide” on the last day to move, and then drag their feet for the next 60. Then quit without notice as soon as they had another job lined up. Don’t get me wrong the market is rough, but 90 days is enough to find a job if you have halfway decent connections and AWS on your resume. By now my team already lost half of our devs (3/6).
More recently, in waves, they’re forcing people to relocate to team hubs. Even teams who were historically spread out across the US. I’m from the west coast but my team is in Colorado and the second I caught wind of this I grinded my ass off and got another job. When I told my manager he was very understanding but frustrated at the situation. My two teammates were even more frustrated, and one of them is on the west coast too. My team could be one person soon.
Didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, but Amazon is nuking teams left and right like this and it will catch up to them. As a whole things are breaking more often in AWS systems than usual, and our service is starting to show cracks. Our reliability is down hard because we had a collective 35 years of knowledge leave our org. Almost all of whom were the team expert.
Yeah, Amazon has a pretty long track record of burning through employees at all levels. From the outside it looks like it’s very much to their detriment, but I guess they feel differently since they still do it.
Sorry it’s happening to you though. Hope you find a less sociopathic employer!
Ohh, so for many employees, it’s not “return to office” at all-- It’s a euphemism for “start going to the office,” which you didn’t have to do before, because your position was remote? That’s actually much worse, wow-- Especially if you’d have to relocate.
Or I guess maybe it’s more like they expect you not to relocate, through the “unofficial layoffs” lens.
That really sucks. I guess it also has some explanatory power for why they are taking these odd half-measures and tolerating non-compliance-- There are people who don’t even live near an office.
Really sorry that’s happening. I hope you find a company that keeps its promises.
Yup! That’s the bullshit part and what really grinds my gears when people say we’re just whining. I have 0 problem going to an office that I was assigned at my date of hire. What I have a problem with is 1) retroactively assigning offices to remote designated employees and 2) forcibly relocating people across the country for zero reason. They’re actively uprooting entire families and fucking so many people over.
I’m fortunate enough to have gotten another job before it impacted me thanks to referrals from friends, but not everyone is as fortunate.
Yes, that is 100% weapons-grade bullshit. Hopefully as a result of all of this, people start insisting on having their remote status written into their contracts, with steep penalties for breaches. Fool me once, shame on you, etc.
Congrats on the new job. I hope things go better for you from now on. At least that AWS experience will provide some nice career capital to make up for your poor treatment.
Thank you! I’m already getting some great use out of it as my new company hired me largely because of my AWS experience. I also learned a ton there thanks to my exceptionally brilliant team so I can’t say I regret my time there even if it was stressful.
Loyalty and obedience prized over competence once again
The policy is as much aimed at pragmatic people managers as it is as actual staff. Your boss might be fully aware that they would struggle to replace you and will be quite happy with you working from home and so cuts an off books deal as this stops your manager from suffering reduced output for their team while they struggle to replace you.
I have personally been in this situation for the last two decades, I have worked from home pretty much full time across multiple, separate companies. One place I worked post lock down even used the staff who didn’t mind being the office to improve the team average to benefit those who did.
A company wide policy like this will make it hard for the manager to cut such a deal, particularly if Amazon get petty over checking IP addresses and swipe card usage.
I think this is very likely, though it’s also prolonging this whole exercise by avoiding the dramatic conclusion and spreading the pain out over a longer time.
If every manager at Amazon woke up tomorrow and said “screw it, we’re enforcing this policy”, that would result in a mass firing event of quality talent, and Amazon would feel the pain of their policy decisions and either have to swallow that and try to move on or beat a hasty retreat and call this whole thing off. It would be a quick and decisive end to this whole debate, but instead we have month after month of employees stressed and angry while looking rebellious and unmanageable, managers stressed and frustrated while looking ineffective, and the senior leadership frustrated and looking impotent.
Someone’s going to win this fight eventually, but everyone trying to find middle ground and skirt the policy just takes what would be one big fight and turns it into many months of slow unease and turmoil that’s bad for everyone. I want the remote people to win this, but sometimes the way to win is the lose on purpose. Let the dog catch the car so he can realize what an idiot he was being.
Completely agree, although I think cheap removal of expensive staff is one of the main goals here. Amazon don’t value the majority of staff, not just the ones involved with the warehouses and home delivery so valuing the output of those in positions that can be work at home isn’t really in their nature. This is of course extremely short sighted of them but they will not change until they are forced to.
its no different when IBM, HP, etc. targeted older workers to be replaced by the then younger and much cheaper millennials who lacked the institutional knowledge and still got undercut by the Indians. Its almost always about the cash.
Some middle managers will actually be ok with WFH and have great people working with them. I guess it’s about those scenarios where the management is actually shielding the employees from a stupid policy.
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Amazing how okay people are with a dictator when they’re called a CEO rather than a politician.
Just give up your whole livelihood, or be forced to move across the country, it’s okay guys it’s policy. Unreal.
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It’s always nice when people preemptively show you their entire ass and let you know you can just block them now.
One day you’re hopefully going to learn that just because a company can do x or y does not mean that they should or that it is in their best interests to do so.
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The problem os that they rely on their employees… go figure… this just means they cant afford to fire these people.
yeah looks like they cannot afford severance and unemployment
Some day I want to understand why this topic is so difficult especially for American companies.
They have to somehow justify their insane commercial real estate expenditures. Empty office buildings are a bad look.
It’s not that it’s a bad look it’s that all of their rich ceo buddies are getting robbed over shit downtown real estate. The companies with central offices support those real estate and they are seeing the value drop off the face of the earth. It’s all about their bottom line. It’s why we saw Biden throw them a bone by saying they’ll pay to covert them to cheap housing.
It’s firing those people after 3 days of non compliance… Why is anyone surprised that Amazon gonna be Amazon?
I didn’t think promotions are contractually obligated usually. As in you’re not guaranteed a promotion and it’s not written into your contract. So if Amazon, or any other company, wants to change the expectations for a promotion then as long as it is clearly communicated and given time to be adopted I don’t see a problem if they want people to work on site. Especially if working from home is, also, not part of your contract.
You don’t have to work for Amazon if you disagree. Find a, much better, job elsewhere.
I appreciate your use of the, often abused, parenthetical comma.
Thanks?
You’re welcome?
😜
That’s the idea. It’s illegal for Amazon to fire people for not wanting to return on-site, so they do the legally allowed minimum to condition promotions based on that. Legal, but still shitty. They hired a ton of remote (by contract) workers during the pandemic and made a shit ton of profit, now they don’t know how to get rid of them without a severance package.
Employment laws are state-by-state, but I don’t know a single one where it’s illegal to fire someone for not coming into the office.
If you employ someone for a remote position you don’t get to fire them for being in a remote position
They can, though the employees would be able to claim unemployment if the job was remote and then changed to on-site but if the job was on-site with a temporary remote policy the employee wouldn’t have a leg to stand on there and could be dismissed for cause.
In the US, what you can and cannot fire someone for is complicated and counter intuitive.
A low performer that is part of a protected class is hard to fire because you need to have copious documentation that they were dismissed due to poor performance and were not targeted for their protected class status. This is a good thing and prevents unscrupulous bosses from firing a woman for getting pregnant, targeting people of a particular race, religion, or gender, or any number of other awful things. Those things will only come up if the former employee sues, and many will not, so some bad bosses or companies get away with this while others end up in court because someone that needed to be fired is crying discrimination.
On the flip side, if it falls outside of those protected classes, you can fire someone for any other reason or no reason at all. “I woke up in a bad mood and picked a name out of a hat to fire” is legal. You may get a fight if the person you picked claims discrimination on one of the protected classes and you have to explain to a judge that you’re actually just a bad human and not discriminating, but it’s allowed.
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I’ve been in and out of these types of contracts for the last 20 years. If a position is remote then it is marked as remote in the contract. Even with the United States’ horrible worker protection laws, they still can’t unilaterally change a contract.
This is true for contract workers, but I believe we’re talking about W2 employees, who rarely have a contract if they’re not part of a union.
My perspective might be skewed because I always have a contract, even when I am an internal FTE. But my circumstance is not necessarily ‘normal’ since I live in Canada but work in the US/EU far more often than at home.
The laws are pretty different for contract workers vs W2 employees. W2 employees can have contracts, but it’s really rare outside of unions. Conditions of employment can in most cases be changed at the employers discretion.
I feel a little bit like I’m defending Amazon here, but I’m really trying to highlight that our worker protections are crap in the US. Unions are really the way to go if employees want security. Tech industry has way too few unions.
I’m not in the US but I was hired at my current job during the pandemic and all of IT except for senior managers and up are 100% remote right now. But the contract I signed said they reserved the right to make me go back to the office at their discretion
That sucks. I would not have signed it as-is and asked for a revision.
I know that speaks to my privilege as much as anything else. But I am at the stage of my life where going back to an office is a non-starter for me, and I am confident that I would find another offer quickly after declining the contract with that kind of wording.
Yeah it wasn’t my first job in IT but it was my first well paying job in IT so I just took it as is
Here is the jist. They can fire you for not going to the office, but they have to fire everybody else who doesn’t go, else there they (the employee) can argue discrimination. And if we are taking a few hundreds of lawsuits, plus all the union movement they are having…
So it’s better to “gently” let the people know they are not welcomed and motivate them to go.
Tl;Dr: Apes, together, strong.
Do you have experience with employment law?
An employee could argue discrimination, but they’d have to have evidence that it was due to a protected class to have any success, and those cases are notoriously hard to prove. In every state that I’m aware of, they can fire people selectively for not coming into the office, while keeping others employed.
It will be up to the judge on each case to decide, I’m sure that we could see different rulings for very similar cases.
Ultimately wether they win or lose they don’t want to stir the flames, else they would have already done what you said. If it was so black and white, the penalty wouldn’t be “blocking promotions”.
Sure, Amazon doesn’t want hundreds of extra lawsuits, but the staff also don’t want to waste their money on legal fees for a suit that’s a guaranteed loss. Case law is very well-established.
What’s with the assumption that it’s the law that is keeping Amazon from mass-firing staff who won’t come in?
The approach they’re taking is just a smart business decision. It allows them to spread the disruptions out so they’re more manageable, to keep employees who’s skills justify flexibility in the WFH rules, and prevents the PR impact of a mass termination.
It depends what’s in their contract. I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing based on zero experience of working in Amazon and am using my knowledge of European employment as a baseline. Of course, your mileage may vary in the US?
In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.
The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.
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It’s almost part of your KPIs, spend too long at a certain level and your manager will push you to work towards getting promoted.
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This article is very specifically talking about coercive exclusion which is illegal in the UK under employment law. Maybe in other countries too.
Wait, is it? Can you cite that? I have a friend who recently moved to the UK and had their promo blocked under this rule.
Coersive Exclusion usually falls under the Equalities Act in the UK and against one of the protected criteria in the act but Nationwide Building Society recently lost a court case against them regarding forced office attendance. I don’t remember the specifics but it may he worth reading up on.
I will add, I’m no legal expert. My advice would be for your friend to speak to Citizens Advice Bureau or a solicitor to see whether they have a case.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amazon told its managers last month that employees slated for promotions must comply with the company’s return-to-office policy, which requires them to be in the office at least three times a week.
“If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required.”
In an email to Insider, Amazon’s spokesperson said compliance with the company’s return-to-office policy was one of the many factors it considers before an employee is promoted.
Last month, Amazon told managers that they now have discretion to fire employees who refuse to comply with the return-to-office policy, as Insider previously reported.
Those employees have argued that some of them were hired as fully remote workers during the pandemic and that they see the mandate as a shift from the previous guidelines that allowed individual managers to determine how their teams worked.
By September, Amazon was sharing individual attendance records on employees, a shift from the previous policy of tracking only anonymized data.
The original article contains 724 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
And? What did they expect?
If your company wants you in person go. Or quit. Not a hard concept.
Or strike. If you and your coworkers feel that your employer has expectations that are unreasonable or sufficiently understandable you have the right to organize and negotiate as a unified force.
Well, not like anybody is getting promoted at my company either…?
How is that relevant?
