Amazon to staff: Come into the office or your promotion is at risk
theregister.com
theregister.com
If you want to work remotely, you can't rely on the kindness of a company's heart. You need to have it in your contract from the beginning.
I know people that moved multiple states away during the pandemic and were then told to either relocate back home (company wasn't paying) or be fired.
I mean, that was the case for all the pandemic remote workers mentioned in the article. Permanent roles with no expectation of relocation to the office, fully remote, etc.
Amazon is just changing the terms of the contract and terminating employment for anyone who doesn't like it.
Hypocrites. They just want everything their way, they don't care what they agreed to initially.
But if the other doesn't agree, they part ways.
But this massively glosses over the fact that the employer has vastly more leverage in this sort of thing.
I work for a large private university. If they told me to come back into the office three days a week I would not even consider not complying. I'm pretty sure they'd fire me after a week or two of me not showing up.
It blows my mind that people can get away with just ignoring such directives -- especially in the commercial sector.
Depends on who you are and how needed you are. And while everyone is replaceable, it is not true that everyone is replaceable within a week, or even a month.
If labor is a seller's market, they can get away with whatever they can get away with. Amazon could just terminate everyone who refuses to RTO; the fact that they haven't done so yet indicates they don't think they have a strong hand in labor negotiations, so why shouldn't people push back?
This was/is naturally where this was always going to end up. There is a lot of "you can't MAKE me do this because you NEED me" going on right now on the part of employees and it is odd to me that people assume that it would go permanently unchallenged.
Lessons in be careful what you measure.
Extraordinary circumstances allowed you to stay remote during a pandemic. Now that it's over, it's fair and expected that they want you to come into the office. Your original contract with them was you being an in-office employee.
There is nothing wrong with them aligning on promotions being tied to you fulfilling your obligations.
If this is all too much, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from leaving and finding a truly remote workplace.
(Disclaimer: I understand some people were hired as remote, told they'd remain remote, and are now being forced to come to the office or relocate. That sucks, and I'm sorry it's happening).
You can bet that trying to get your employer to abide by the terms written on it will be impossible if they decide they don't like what they originally agreed to.
You even mention such cases where people signed a remote-only contract which employers are now using intimidation tactics to get you to ignore.
Since employers are so brazenly treating contracts as being non binding, why should employees?
Basically: it is far past time that employees started using our own muscle to get the clowns in charge to behave.
Refuse to go back to offices.
Contracts are generally worth more than that, because they give you a basis on which you can successfully sue. However, that means that a contract's value depends on what you're willing and able to do to enforce it.
Even if you did have the resources, do you want your name to show up on every Google search as "the guy who sued his last employer" when you're job hunting?
There is a lot of social pressure for people to just shut up and take whatever their bosses give them.
In general, sure (although in most US states you can get lots of assistance), but in the HN crowd? I expect that the majority of people here make good money and can afford to do this.
> do you want your name to show up on every Google search as "the guy who sued his last employer" when you're job hunting?
Why not? Most employers aren't going to be searching for such lawsuits in the first place, and it's not likely to hurt you with the ones that do (unless they're shady, in which case -- bullet dodged).
> There is a lot of social pressure for people
Absolutely true, but it's still a choice the employee is making.
My point is that a contract does have value beyond the paper its printed on, but the enforcement of it is up to the parties who signed the contract. Choosing not to enforce a contract you're a part of doesn't mean the value isn't there, it means you're opting not to make use of that value.
Amazon office workers generally do.
As for the Google search, I’ve been a hiring manager in the past, and usually part of an interview team at any company I’ve worked at for the last 20 years, and I’ve never heard of such a thing. Maybe it shows up in a background check, who knows. But I would think it would have come up at least once.
Regardless, the contract is obviously worth more than the paper, as you’ve already pointed out. We are just arguing about the consequences.
Imagine an employer telling you "hey, you can't get a new job we have a '''contract''' with you" You'd tell them to get f---ed
Now imagine a layoff or org restructuring.
If you think either employer or employee is making eternal promises, you're dumb.
A lot of the issue is that middle management and senior management are not on the same page here, in a rare example of middle management's interests being more aligned with rank-and-file workers. A lot of middle managers at Amazon (think L6 through L8) aren't any happier with RTO than the lower ICEs are, and so they're really slow-walking the process: giving false status reports of progress and granting lots of exceptions. (I know one L7 at Amazon who gathered all his directs' badges and beeps them into the office every morning to make it look like people are there). Senior leadership at Amazon is really grumpy about this and trying to find leverage wherever they can to get everyone back even when middle management is lying to them.
That person sounds like the kind of manager people would fight to work for
The hero we need but do not deserve
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278966
Not a lawyer, not particularly well informed, but this is my understanding.