Amazon Tells Employees to Relocate or Resign | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Tells Employees to Relocate or Resign

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The following is not legal advice, it's just my opinion. DYOR, check with a lawyer, etc.

"Do you want to relocate or resign?" is a false dichotomy. You can always just refuse to answer (possibly with soft words like ""I'm not sure" or "I haven't decided yet") -- keep doing your job, and wait until the company lets you go.

I'm pretty sure, if a company moves its operations and your job no longer exists in the same location, you're entitled to unemployment benefits -- but not if you resign.

The "Relocate or resign" phrasing seems to be trying to trick the affected employees into giving up their rights to unemployment benefits.

Indeed, talk to an employment attorney to maximize your outcome. You gain nothing by resigning, it’s a ploy to absolve them of any separation cost or potential legal claims (constructive dismissal, refusal to provide ADA accommodations, etc).

Usually if the worksite moves more than some distance, usually +/- 50 miles, you can claim UI if you don't relocate.

Yes but the employer must first fire you for refusing to relocate.

Hence _dont resign_.

Some companies try and cheat employees illegally by not only telling you one of two options but also tell you that no response is "voluntary resignation".

The correct answer is speak to an employment lawyer, but it's usually as simple as you draft a letter that says "I do not accept the relocation and I AM NOT resigning".

I'm also not a lawyer, but wouldn't getting fired for not showing up to work be for-cause, thus excluding you from unemployment benefits? My understanding (which isn't clarified in the article) is these employees weren't hired to be remove, they were hired at an office.

Changing working location could be a contract change, and (at least in the netherlands), employees cant be forced to accept contract changes or resign.

Even in the USA, changing work location seems like constructive dismissal.

It really depends on what your employment agreement says. If it specifically stipulates that your position is “remote” and your company decides to change that, you could argue that your agreement would need to be renegotiated and their breaking of the contract would entitle you to whatever remedies are in the contract for you when that happens. Hopefully you have a remedy beyond “you stop working for us and we stop paying you”.

My guess is that most larger company agreements post-Covid will have a clause that defines that they have the ability to determine the employee’s work location with at-will covering the employee’s option.

If you think about it—historically, an organization could move its office and most employees did not have a final say in the location. Companies might try to find locations in a workable proximity for most employees, and relocation help options if it’s a bigger move. However, generally it was if it didn’t work for you…you found a new job. Covid and remote work changed the dynamics a bit, but with the state of tech employment levels today technology pros may not have much flexibility to push back.

Given the mad max employment law, I am just hoping (?) that there are some restrictions on this. Otherwise, why would a company ever do layoffs? Just have an employment clause that you can be relocated at any time.

“Yeah, next week we are going to need you to be at work in the Alaska office. Following week, your butt needs to be in Florida. Failure to comply is an instant termination “

Would you sign on with a company that would have a reputation to do that sort of thing?

That is why…

Exactly, I signed an "offer letter" that had new working place terms and a comp decrease. (USA, not Amazon though)

Even in the land of the torment nexus, workers have some protections against unilateral changes to their working arrangements.

Unemployment benefits are not that good. You are better off not answering, then coming down to it, say YES I will move. And spend that 90 days looking for a new job.

Whenever you're applying for unemployment benefits, just give "position eliminated" as the reason. It doesn't ask who eliminated it.

What you're talking about is called constructive dismissal, which is when rather than firing you an employer changes the nature of your job to make it impossible or intolerable to fulfill, waits for you to either quit or fail to meet the new conditions and get fired for cause, then can avoid paying unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_...

> “…then can avoid paying unemployment.”

I don’t think this is true. Failure to meet your firm’s work standards is not disqualifying. I think it has to be criminal behavior, such as theft. And voluntary leaving a job.

Failure to meet work standards isn't disqualifying but changes to time and location like that aren't written up as failure to meet standards, they're written up as job abandonment, which itself is considered a type of voluntary resignation and is therefore disqualifying. The law differentiates between showing up but being bad at the job and not showing up at all, and constructive dismissal laws exist to prevent employers from manufacturing job abandonment in order to disqualify an employee.

One thing I learned in researching this is that constructive dismissal only applies where the employee has resigned rather than being terminated. It's not a non-voluntary resignation, it's a voluntary resignation that is coerced and is therefore an exception to the unemployment laws that would normally disqualify you for resigning voluntarily.

At this point long commutes just seem a waste of time (and I know a number of people in the Seattle area who are forced into long commutes by Amazon only to do most remote meetings once they arrive).

Sometimes I do think the ideal job would be a medium-sized company with an office within walking distance of everyone's home. When everyone in the office is aligned on the same thing it's really great to be in-person. I don't think this holds for a giant organization like Amazon.

The demands to relocate to the same office as your team should eliminate the "only to do most remote meetings" problem, but woof. I can't imagine demanding either jerking around your talent like this (forcing a big move) nor commuting 5 days a week.

Just feels like a billionaire commitment to insuring a better world isn't possible.

Why do these companies keep trying to fire remote employees? Is it so hard to let them keep working from home? Is the company's real estate portfolio that important? You could probably even pay remote workers less (or give non-remote employees a "bonus" for coming in) and everyone would still be happy.

My guess is that there's tax breaks on the line in most cases. That is, corporations got some tax breaks on the basis of so many humans in downtown (or whatever office). If they don't meet those obligations, they loose some overly generous subsidy.

Look at it from the companies' point of view:

- Human contact is more important than efficiency gains, hence mandating return-to-office.

- At the same time, efficiency gains are more important than human contact, hence reducing human headcount in favor of increased AI use.

If you read between the lines, you can see how those two points are related: humans find difficult to feel connected when their communication partner is just pixels on a screen, so that's why remote workers are being replaced with AI.

> Human contact is more important than efficiency gains, hence mandating return-to-office.

First, citation needed. Second, in this day and age companies try whatever they can to ruin in-office employees' morale as well, which goes counter to the position that social quality of life is important for efficiency.

The endless Q&A between employees and bosses show that it's not about collaboration, and bosses aren't saying what it's really about. None of their answers make sense.

Poe's law strikes again, I should have added "/s" at the end of my message.

If I had to rewrite my previous message in a less subtle way, it would be that companies are constantly contradicting themselves when giving any public "reason" for their actions, and I do not think employees' happiness (which fathomdeez focuses on) is anywhere close to their actual reason.

Too many issues with remote employees disappearing to do other stuff during the day. Amazon and others are requiring employees to go to any office, not necessarily the one with their teammates, so it's evidently not about in-person collaboration. My manager (different company) told me straight up, the dept is ok with me working remote but not other people.

Older than this is the "open office" thing. We saw over time how this wasn't about collaboration or even space-saving, but about keeping employees under watch.

isn’t it trivial for management to see a higher bar, and enforce it? If expectations are not met, just fire them. The solution is simple IMO.

Are the managers competent? Do they know how to evaluate if work/goals are being met without counting how many hours the employee is online?

Letting people work at a slow pace for a while, PIPing them, then ultimately firing, is very expensive. An unproductive teammate not only doesn't get stuff done but also brings down the rest of the team.

Edit: Some companies also don't like the morale effects of sink-or-swim, though Amazon is fine with it I've heard.

i agree it’s expensive. but that can happen in person in the office too, right? The risk of a bad hire is high regardless i think.

They aren't exactly bad hires. Lots of previously solid employees were going kinda AWOL sometimes while remote. Even if someone wants to be responsive, after seeing enough pings go unanswered all day, they might follow suit.

They could redefine the job requirements to be remote-first, but that'd require a lot of firing and hiring.

I suspect this will become increasingly common with companies that allow remote work. Atlassian is a large Australian tech employer that is full remote, and this is definitely the case there - performance reviews twice yearly and a very high attrition rate.

I can certainly see a company that wants to be remote-first making it work. Probably not one that has already invested tons of money and time in offices filled with well-established employees.

From what I can tell, it's currently an employers' market.

1) Companies are reducing salaries when they hire new workers.

2) Companies are not having problems finding in person employees.

I'm going to have a surprised pikachu face when the market flips and everyone resigns from these companies.

Yeah there's this too, some overhired in 2020-21 and want to get rid of people, and it's cheaper if they resign than if they're laid off.

As I’ve written in the past, companies that tolerate or even encourage WFH will have advantages when it comes to hiring (or retaining) older workers or workers with professional partners. If young bodies are what’s desired, yeah, do the cattle call. If skill and experience matters or there’s any talent availability issues they’re limiting their hiring pool.

I've read everything you've written and it's all solid gold (no homo).

Good thing you specified, because I was assuming that you were gay.

Read up on "constructive dismissal" and talk with an employment lawyer.

The US road system is a HUGE subsidy to companies by enabling employees to commute long distances. If companies bore the commute costs of worker commutes they would be MUCH more in favor of remote work.

It is obvious that the "suburb-to-downtown commute" lifestyle arrangement of America is not scalable, wasteful and a massive quality of life drain. Yet we're committing to it, why? Because the employers don't want to pay more in unemployment insurance and try to lay you off in some roundabout way? This is maddening.

It's not scalable, but it works ok if you don't try to scale it too much. Like don't cram several big tech companies' employees into one city.

This is practically unavoidable because of how economies work. People want to live near jobs, and jobs want to be near people. So we get congregations of people (urbanism).

It's not like these tech companies actually want to be in a high COL area paying out big fat salaries and paying exorbitant rent on their "campus" nobody cares for. But they want the talent, so they play ball.

Do people remember during Covid how it was a “remote work revolution” and how it was going to cause sweeping changes to how people worked and how the economy functioned?

Pepperidge Farms remembers…

Not to toot my own horn or even make a pretty obvious prediction, my HN history has a comment from years ago predicting pretty much exactly what happened.

Companies would do it as long as they needed to. Once they knew they had more people than positions it would be a slow squeeze and eventual “come in to the office or quit”.

Move to the locations where the non-compete laws are more favorable to Amazon.

A non-compete wouldn’t stop me unless it specifically named the competitors, what they wanted to protect, and why.

Non-competes have such a high reasonableness standard that they are not even worth trying to enforce unless you are specifically trying to fuck over your former company.

I thought Amazon had already cut WFH? Who is left that they are messaging?

You had to show up to an office. Now you have to show up to the same office as your team, is more or less what I'm getting.

What's the difference between resign and layoff :)

Resign is employee initiated, being laid off, or layoff, is company initiated. Not sure about other states, but in Illinois if you resign, most likely you won't qualify for unemployment benefits. If you're laid off (as I've been multiple times), you can qualify for unemployment benefits. I'm basing this on my experience, but you should consult an attorney before signing anything if you're being fired/laid off/let go, etc.

In Germany, it’s similar: you’re entitled to unemployment benefits regardless (if you’ve been an employee of a company that pays for your salary and taxes), but if you quit you don’t get benefits for 3 months as a “penalty”, so people ask to get fired by their employer and in some cases the employer obliges.

That and severance pay if the company does it. From the article: "if they chose [to resign], they would not receive severance pay."

This is just another soft layoff.

Amazon has been aggressively reducing headcount for several years now. First they did multiple rounds of actual layoffs, then they ended remote work, and now you have to relocate to live near a hub office.

Mass resignations accomplish the same as layoffs but are much cheaper for Amazon due to not paying severance.

What about CO2?

It's unclear from the article, but it seems like these people were hired near an office, (stupidly) moved away during covid, and now don't want to return. I have sympathy for them, but also it seems stupid to have thought remote work would last longer than covid.

Remember that period of time when they were writing articles about the "new normal"? Some people thought it would last a really long time. And fwiw it's been 5 years already

I did this, not at Amazon though. It's a calculated risk that's gone ok so far. If things change, new job or moving back are always options, but most likely not moving back.

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