The sun is out and worker protests are very much on.
See here: Hundreds of Amazon corporate workers walked off the job Wednesday for an hour to signal a "lack of trust" in the company's leadership and call attention to their frustrations, my colleague Catherine Thorbecke reports.
"We're here because a lot of Amazonians feel in their gut that something is not right with the company," Eliza Pan, a former Amazon worker and co-founder of the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group, said Wednesday at the walkout in Seattle. "And there are a lot of signs of this, such as a rigid, one-size-fits-all return-to-office mandate."
The workers, who aren't unionized, have two main demands:
- They want Amazon to put climate impact at the forefront of its decision-making
- And they want greater flexibility on how and where employees work.
KEY BACKGROUND
Amazon, like other Big Tech companies, cut tens of thousands of jobs beginning late last year in what the companies tend to call "right sizing" after going on a hiring spree during the lucrative era of the pandemic.
All told, Amazon has said this year that it is laying off some 27,000 workers over multiple rounds of cuts.
At the same time, tech companies (among others) are trying to persuade their staffs to resume an office routine that resembles pre-pandemic normalcy.
In February, Amazon said it would require thousands of its workers to be in the office for at least three days per week, starting on May 1.
Employees who spoke to Catherine described an overwhelming sense of low morale and frustration over Amazon's return-to-office mandate.
In a statement Wednesday, Amazon acknowledged it may "take time" for some workers to adjust to being in the office more days and said it's "working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible for employees."
BIG PICTURE
Even as the pandemic fades into the rear view, certain fissures that it created in society refuse to fully heal. Nowhere is that more apparent than in corporate workers' relationship to the office.
It hasn't taken much to persuade people to return to some of the more appealing parts of pre-pandemic life: Restaurants are packed, flights and hotels are booked. But office buildings are a whole other story. They're persistently half-full, and the businesses that cater to them are struggling as a result.
Before 2020, we all seemed to agree that work mostly had to happen one way, and that way was in-person, in an office far from our homes that we (for reasons that remain unclear to me) had to actually dress up for. Five. Days. A week.
It took a blunt force that no one wanted to shatter the illusion that was how it had to be. Managers are frantically trying to superglue it all back together and pretend it never broke in the first place, with limited success. More than three years in, workers are increasingly saying they don't care if it means losing opportunities or even ending on up on a layoff list — they aren't going back to the rigidity of the Before Times, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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