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Amazon tells managers they can now fire employees who won’t come into the office 3 times a week::Amazon shared new guidelines that give managers a template for terminating employees over RTO.
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2020 - 2023 has really revealed just how little business leaders really have a clue about anything. They are all high-performers who push and push but don’t really have any idea what is important or not. What we really need is a ban on business bros lol.
Have you considered that lowering headcount via rto firings increases profits, which leads to short-term growth in the stock market, so bonuses? Sure, some people will lose their homes, but someone else got a new boat. When God closes a door, he opens a window 🙏
An anecdote:
My high-paying tech job wants us back 2 days a week. I intentionally bought a house near a train that will get me to the downtown office in about 15 minutes while many of my coworkers live in the distant suburbs where commuting will require a lot more time and effort.
Despite this, I STILL don’t go into the office. The biggest reasons:
- Nobody is there - it’s a ghost town.
- I’m far less productive while I’m there because I have to leave early to pick up my kids from school.
- My boss doesn’t go in at all - ever - due to extremely valid health reasons (his wife is undergoing cancer treatment).
- His boss moved out of state. Like way, way out of state. He’s got a nice office with a beautiful view. He doesn’t and can’t use it.
- My boss’s boss’s boss - (the CTO) moved to Florida and, rumor has it, lives full-time on his yacht.
I mean… at some point we just have to acknowledge that our giant, empty office space would be much better suited as housing.
It’s a punishment in the class war. The upper class think the peasants have it too good. You literally have the rich going on the news saying “a nice little recession” will straighten out workers.
It’s all about unused office space and it’s value.
I seriously doubt this is the case, mostly because it doesn’t actually pencil out money-wise.
More likely, it’s a stealthy way to be able to lay people off without calling it a layoff.
Also, in-office employees are easier to control and monitor for bad managers.
I’d reckon it’s probably a bit of pile A a bit of pile B depending on the company location of the offices
It’s also a way to steal pay from any employees that were paid in stocks and haven’t been fully vetted yet.
Amazon is notorious for paying less salary in currency and more in stocks that will take like 3 years before they belong to the employees.
I left a job in France (the base company is American) partly because of this stupid rule (3 days at the office) they tried to push. Our contracts give us the right to 2 days only. There was absolutely no need at all to do it but the managers were all on it like flies on a turd. 4 days was like their wet dream.
IMO it was all about control locally, but the USA base company “asked for it” which means way different things in the USA and the EU (in France you can’t just order people around that way or fire them ‘on a whim’), but they sure jumped on it like it was free abuse day for psychopaths.
Helped me leave that toxic environment though, gotta see the silver lining right!
I keep hearing people making this argument.
Is the assumption that Amazon is ignoring their finance dept and that this is driven by the sunk cost fallacy? “We dumped a bunch of money into this, therefore we should continue to move forward with it.”
I ask because the appraised value of property is based on what other’s will likely pay for it. If no one else is wants to pay a lot of money for my office space, it doesn’t matter if I have 1 employees or 10,000 employees in that building.
I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.
Edited to add: these properties may become a liability on their books which would impact their ability to apply for or pay for loans, as well as other negatives for the company.
A lot of companies have long-term contracts for these office spaces that they can’t get out of, so whether or not their workers are using the space, they have to pay for it. They should really just write it off as a loss, but I’m not too familiar with how that works. Maybe they can’t.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at with the “sunk cost” thing. “We’re stuck paying for it, so we should use it.”
Even if using it make people less productive, make recruiting harder, and forces tech companies to pay expensive regional Silicon Valley salaries.
This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.
Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:
- 3 on 1 off: working 25% of the time
- 5 on, 2 off: working 23.8% of the time
- 4 on, 2 off: working 22.2% of the time
- 5 on 3 off: working 20.8% of the time
- 4 on 3 off: working 19.0% of the time
This is, perhaps naively, assuming that employers wouldn’t just increase the number of days you’re working. Weeks are now 10 days long, and you work for 7 of them.
I tried to pick ratios that wouldn’t cause riots in the streets, haha. Interestingly, 7-3 is still less work overall than the current standard 5-2. I could get behind a 3-1-4-2 system.
It’s not an actual 4 day work week, but I’ve been working 4 tens in the format of 1-1-3-2, and it’s been great. Turns out Monday isn’t all that bad, when you have another day off immediately after
I got a 4 ten hour day schedule with 3 days off and I MUCH prefer it over 5 eight hour days. Having a whole extra day off easily makes up for working ten hours IMO.
I used to have a rolling 4 ten week, so Monday off one week then Tuesday the following etc. The best part was the week you have Friday the next you have Monday so it’s a 4 day weekend every month. But the job was so fucking boring and they’d still come around every day 9 hours into the shift asking if you wanted to do 2 hours overtime… So 4 days was basically work, go home, shower, eat, sleep repeat. I personally need some wind down time each day but I can definitely see how some people would like this setup
It was because they saw 7 objects in the sky.
7 isn’t random. A lunar cycle (ever wondered where the word month comes from - the moon of course) is 28 days. Aka exactly 4 weeks.
The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.
The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.
Fuck these scum. End the monopoly and make wfh an environmental policy
While this is totally shitty. What does this have to do with technology?
We are talking about Amazon corporate decisions, not Amazon technology solutions or anything, why is this here?
You literally have to use technology to use Amazon so I think that qualifies right?
By that logic literally everything posted on the internet is “technology” which… it isn’t.
So no, this doesn’t count.
I’ve been back in the office since June 2020. Not by choice either.
I envy these people
Every single time you go to that job, it was your choice.
On the one hand, you gotta do what you gotta do to put food on the table. But on the other hand, that’s 3 years to be looking for a new employer…
Pretty sh!tty, especially for remote workers. No surprise since this is Amazon.
3 times? My work will soon start making us come in 4 days a week and before the pandemic that was never an expectation. If it was a tough week to go in I had the freedom to work at home a few days and nobody but my manager gave a damn when I was there and when I wasn’t.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This conversation will 1) reinforce that return to office 3+ days a week is a requirement of their job, and 2) explain that continued non-compliance without a legitimate reason may lead to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of your employment," the guidelines said.
First announced in February, Amazon’s return-to-office process has been unusually contentious, with more than 30,000 employees signing an internal petition and many others walking out earlier this year in opposition to it.
Employees have expressed frustration because they were hired as fully remote workers during the pandemic and they see the current mandate as a shift from a policy allowing individual leaders to determine how their teams worked.
In an email to Insider, Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was seeing “more energy, connection, and collaboration” with the vast majority of employees in the office more frequently.
In the guidelines, Amazon encourages managers to “assume positive intent” and “make high-judgment decisions” regarding individual situations, such as ascertaining whether employees have missed attendance requirements because they’re on paid time off or at home because of an illness.
If the noncompliance continues, managers should conduct follow-up discussions within a couple of weeks, where they have to reinforce the three-times-a-week attendance policy and explain possible disciplinary action that includes “termination of your employment.”
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