Amazon employees challenge 5-day-a-week office return

By Free Republic | Created at 2024-11-01 18:41:46 | Updated at 2024-11-05 23:24:43 4 days ago

Amazon employees challenge 5-day-a-week office return
Seattle Times ^ | October 31, 2024 | Lauren Rosenblatt

Posted on 11/01/2024 11:40:36 AM PDT by absalom01

More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January.

The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate that has been in place since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the initial three-day-a-week mandate as well, but Amazon did not change course. About 15 months later, it increased the requirement for in-office work in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms.

The employee letter is in response to comments from Garman at a recent AWS town hall meeting, where the new CEO told employees that if they did not want to comply with the five-day-a-week mandate, there are other companies around.

In an interview with The Seattle Times last week, Garman doubled down on those comments, confirming that he supports the new policy and believes employees work better when they are in the office together.

“It’s OK that’s not how everyone thinks that’s how they want to work,” Garman told The Times. “You can choose to go work for another company … Employees get to make the call.

(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...

TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; History; Local News
KEYWORDS: remotework; rto; wfh

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AWS isn't sugar-coating this. They're making it clear that the terms of employment at Amazon require in-person attendance. But if people don't like that, it's not like they're being forced to work for Amazon. It'll be interesting to see which employees decide to bail, and which decide that those big fat Amazon paychecks and benefit packages are worth the commute.

1 posted on 11/01/2024 11:40:36 AM PDT by absalom01

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