Amazon Orders Employees To Relocate To Seattle and Other Hubs (seattletimes.com) 94
93 Escort Wagon writes: More proof that Amazon's leadership views the balance of power between itself and its workforce tilting decisively in its favor: Amazon's employees are being told they must relocate to one of the company's large hubs -- with the company specifying the required location -- or resign with no severance. CEO Andy Jassy did have the grace to give people 30 days to decide.
That's just layoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day IBM did a mass round of layoffs of management. It's something that a lot of older nerds like to celebrate.
I looked into it and it turns out the reason they did it was to get rid of old workers. They had promoted a bunch of older workers into management roles even though they were still doing engineering work. They didn't want to keep paying the higher wages and health insurance costs but age discrimination is technically a thing.
So the CEO declared they were firing management and use that to get rid of all the old folk. There were a couple of lawsuits after the fact and if memory serves they lost a few of them. I suspect the payouts on the lawsuits were less than the cost of the buyouts for proper layoffs.
Re:That's just layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Resigning means Amazon doesn't have to make unemployment payments while firing requires such payments?
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Unemployment benefits are paid by a state unemployment insurance fund, not by companies.
Companies pay premiums into the fund.
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True, BUT...
More unemployment claims against a company will often RAISE their unemployment tax rate in the future. So if they can get people to resign and not have claims, they save money in the long run.
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In Washington State, your unemployment insurance rates are set by the state and they are raised in proportion to how many payable claims are made against you – except that there's a cap. Once you've reached a certain number of payable claims and you hit that cap, your rates don't go any higher. A big company like Amazon has probably reached that cap long ago and so this isn't a risk factor in how they treat people.
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Re: in proportion to how many payable claims (Score:2)
That is also my understanding.
People should also remember that this costs the company LESS than paying the full employee salary let alone the additional costs of an employees insurance, retirement, etc.
I've moved out of seattle but I do remember having to pay a 'head tax' for each employee on top of the other required city, state, and federal taxes/fees.
At least that's what the accountant said the missing money went to...
Like Nebulo pointed out, the unemployment insurance costs won't bother Amazon.
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Absolutely. But that's a different issue than was raised by the post I responded to.
Re:That's just layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
I once worked at a place where they moved the site to a place with no bus line. A blind guy I worked with had to quit because it was physically impossible to get to the site for him.
When we got to the site there was this completely pointless carpool program that was being pushed real hard. This was a dirt poor call center nobody was going to be getting into a carpool. The one buddy I knew who tried to do it found it every single person in the carpool didn't have a car and was just looking for a ride.
I wondered why they did it because I knew the program wasn't going to work. I found out later from the blind guy who I hung out with on the side that they used that carpool program to deny his unemployment claim. Well, not deny. He got the money initially and then was forced to pay it back with interest.
I don't think people around here realize how hostile to workers our economy is because a lot of people have been in the tech sector and it's been relatively calm by comparison to the rest of the economy.
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So don't use the company's arbiter, hire your own.
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See while you were busy worrying about woke and trans or whatever your preferred moral panic was (got to keep those kids from playing d&d right?) the billionaires and their cronies were busy undermining every single institution designed to protect you.
You have so far enjoyed the benefits of survivorship bias. Maybe you will drop dead before the shit hits
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When you sign the "contact of adhesion" which includes the arbitration agreement, it states who the arbitrator will be. You get to choose, the employer chooses them for you. Some of the arbitrators are severely biased towards a favorable award to the employer as they are the ones paying the arbitrator for their services. One of the better ones is the American Arbitration Association . (However a lot of employers are gravitating away from the AAA in search of someone who can produce more wins for the company
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Futhermore I notice but you don't everything (Score:1)
Is collapsing. Collapsing before our eyes. It's like how we blame cell phones on everything wrong with kids and not the ludicrous amounts of pressure we're putting on them because we know the entire economy and job market is collapsing and there aren't going to be enough jobs available for the number of people capable of working them so we're all hoping our kid is going to get the edge and be allowed to have a home and a car and food and medicine.
And don't get me started with stealth layoffs everywhere I ca
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I doubt it. These are people who moved away after Amazon started letting people temporarily work from home. They kept their job and worked remote. Amazon then forced people to start returning to the office.
Until now, these people have been able to go to small "satellite" locations instead. Amazon is beginning to close these and is now telling people that they must relocate to actual offices or resign. If you read the article then you would know.
So yes you can absolutely resign. But it will be difficult to g
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While you're technically correct, where I am, the company's UI tax is based on their history of unemployment claims. The more claims they've had, the more tax they pay. So your implication that firing vs. resigning makes no difference to the company is wrong.
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Nope. At least in California, not sure about other states (Not a lawyer so this isn't legal advice):
1. You are permitted to collect unemployment of you lose your job because of no fault on your own.
2. You can be "Fired for Cause" and be barred from collecting unemployment. This is a high bar for the company to prove in California as your action has to be "willful"
3. The company can contest your unemployment claim, and there is an internal appeals process up to the point administrative law judge. After the f
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Legally they can't fire you either, they can only lay you off. They'd have to have just cause to fire you and refusing to relocate doesn't even pass the sniff test. Laid off makes you eligible for unemployment benefits and it gives you cause to demand delivery of any unvested stock grants. Which for Amazon employees is a lot of money.
Re:That's just layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon is kind of a bully. Not only do they treat their workers badly (this article being evidence of but one of their transgressions), but their business practices drive prices up across other vendors as well (their contracts require merchants to offer the lowest price at Amazon).
So, if you dislike these things, consider going out of your way to buy things anywhere BUT Amazon.
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I meant to say that Amazon's contracts require vendors to offer the lowest price at Amazon AFTER Amazon's hefty storefront fees. That's how Amazon's influence inflates prices for other storefronts. Other storefronts offer lower storefront fees, but a vendor cannot therefore lower the asking price through those storefronts (if said vendor also wants to sell on Amazon). And basically all vendors MUST sell through Amazon in order to get any exposure.
The end result is higher prices for us across the board, a
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Amazon is kind of a bully.
What do you mean, Kind of????? They're a capital letter BULLY.. I can't imagine anybody desperate enough to work for them. As not buying from them, sure you can find items you need elsewhere, but their convienience is hard to avoid...
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We all know this is just layoffs. I wonder how much of it is regular layoffs and how much of it is getting rid of older workers.
No, if you put only a small amount of thought into it it looks like just layoffs. As soon as you think even a bit about this you'll realise it is too stupid to be layoffs. When a company wants to lay people off they typically want to decide which talent to keep and which to purge. Placing an arbitrary work from office policy in place doesn't do that, it becomes bloody expensive, especially when you are forced to rehire the talent you actually needed.
Unless you can show that remote workers are precisely all
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> Placing an arbitrary work from office policy in place doesn't do that
The standard practice is to give exceptions to people you don't want to lose. Then a couple months later you might retract the policy in order to entice new hires.
company specifying the required location so they w (Score:4, Interesting)
company specifying the required location so they will pay for reallocation?
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company specifying the required location so they will pay for reallocation?
Based on my experience with another company in the early 2000s and this whole "Take it or resign without severance" thing, I would bet almost anything I have that the employees will not be paid for relocation. If they were going to be paying for relocation, the whole situation would have been handled differently. I would imagine the whole point of this is to do massive layoffs without paying severance and refusing to pay for relocation is one way to discourage people from taking them up on this half-ass
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They offered to pay relocation the first two times they demanded this.
Depends if this is targeting the same groups.
If a new group then probably yes.
If one of the groups already demanded to return, who have rejected being paid to relocate, then almost certainly no.
Amazon sees resignation of those employees a better option for amazon.
Most if not all of those people have already decided they aren't going to do any work for amazon ever again and are just collecting a paycheck at home for as long as possible.
um what (Score:1)
If your job location is "remote" (or a small hub) that's the job you were given. It's sometimes the case that a company will move headquarters (like when Toyota moved to Texas) or perhaps an entire department, and then employees are given the option of moving or being laid off, but to do this to individual employees in the USA is rare and to not get severance is extremely so. The whole point of severance is to keep employees from suing. If an employer is getting rid of employees, not for cause, and without
Re:um what (Score:5, Interesting)
If your job location is "remote" (or a small hub) that's the job you were given. It's sometimes the case that a company will move headquarters (like when Toyota moved to Texas) or perhaps an entire department, and then employees are given the option of moving or being laid off, but to do this to individual employees in the USA is rare and to not get severance is extremely so. The whole point of severance is to keep employees from suing. If an employer is getting rid of employees, not for cause, and without severance, it's ... well it's not a risk-averse choice I'll say that.
It takes months to move and months to find a new job once you're fairly senior so this is what is called a "dick move" in bird culture.
More than a dick move, unless your employment contract explicitly allows the company to force you to relocate or specifies that your work location is at a particular location, forcing you to move is a violation of your employment contract, and potentially illegal.
No one who is getting these notices should do anything without consulting two lawyers — one in their state of residence and one in Seattle, because in the event of any conflict of law, the weaker party may be favored regardless of any contract terms to the contrary, and you are by far the weaker party compared with such a large employer.
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You sound like you'd love to have an owner rather than a boss.
Re: So get another one (Score:2)
Re: So get another one (Score:2)
That seems fair. It also seems fair that we can united and do some collective bargainig for a better deal.
Employers have all the power again... (Score:2)
Let them fire you! (Score:5, Insightful)
Between years of layoffs and slow hiring, the power is completely with employers now.
Always was. Any illusion of workers having any actual bargaining power in the employee-employer relationship is just that — an illusion. When you have a multi-billion-dollar company with 1.5 million employees, do you think they actually ever cared about losing a few? This fundamental imbalance is why most countries have strong laws to protect employees from abusive employers. Give it a little time, and Washington will pass laws in response to this, and Amazon will begin to regret their short-sightedness, having made all future layoffs harder by being too greedy during this one.
That said, in this case, the employees still have a choice not to cede even more power to the employer unnecessarily. Amazon cannot force anyone to come back to the office. This isn't a totalitarian regime where secret police can drag you out of your bed at night at the behest of a company. You have a choice whether to return or not, and if you do not, they have a choice about whether to fire you or not. It's as simple as that.
If a large enough number of people refuse their false choice (resign or move back), they might relent. And if they don't, then you're still no worse off for having made that choice. After all, resigning with no severance provides you with absolutely no benefit other than a mostly theoretical opportunity to go back to Amazon in the future. Realistically, there's no reason to believe that they'll ever hire you without you moving back, so if you're not willing to move back, then there's exactly zero reason not to just let them fire you for refusing the forced location transfer.
Furthermore, if you were hired remotely originally, then you have a strong wrongful termination claim, because forcing you into the office is at least arguably constructive dismissal [mcmillan.ca]. (Yes, I realize Canadian law doesn't provide precedent for Washington State, but similar principles exist here in the U.S.)
And either way, if they fire you, you will likely be eligible for unemployment, which is free money. Amazon has to pay into that fund, and if they fire a large enough number of people, their unemployment insurance costs will skyrocket, so you'll be actively punishing Amazon by refusing to leave voluntarily.
So unless you're seriously thinking about moving back and working there in person, either immediately or in the future, there is absolutely no rational reason why anyone in their right minds would resign. Let them fire you, then file for unemployment and trash them on Glassdoor. That approach does the most damage to Amazon, both financially and reputationally, and it also maximizes your income. It's a win-win. Even better, when you tell your next employer why you left your previous company, you'll immediately know whether they are decent human beings. If they reject you because of it, you'll know that you don't want to work for them.
They could do that? (Score:5, Informative)
I know in Canada that would never fly.
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Like most other civilized countries as well. In the USA the results will be a bump in stock prices and bonuses for suits.
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Also illegal in the UK. While they can relocate offices, they'd have to go through an employee consultation process and they certainly would be making redundancy payments. It's also typical to have 1-3 month notice periods in employment contracts. The way TFA is phrased sounds like constructive dismissal.
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All the more reason not to base employees in Canada.
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Absolutely. It would be called "constructive dismissal" and Amazon would be in for a world of pain. You can't unilaterally change the conditions of someone's work without offering mutually-acceptable compensation.
But the US is not a civilized country when it comes to workers' rights.
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California and Washington have constructive discharge/dismissal laws, too, FYI, and I suspect most other states do as well.
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Double-Standard (Score:1)
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On one hand, property owners can legally excavate through Earth's crust, mantle, magma, and core... on their slice of heaven.
If you don't own mineral rights you don't even own the land fairly close to the surface. And even if you do there is in fact no legal basis that gives unlimited ownership to the center of the earth -- at best U.S. courts have been inconsistent. There is definitely no basis in law establishing ownership below the depth of two miles, and between the surface and that two mile depth there are plenty of carve-outs that limit what you can do. Usually local governments can tunnel under your property without recour
How to loose your ... (Score:1)
... human capital in 30 days.
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Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.
Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment
France sent one of its biggest CEO to jail forthis (Score:2)
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wow! I'd never heard of this. Most of the English coverage is more political/ legal sounding. The more detailed stuff is all in French articles afaicf
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
https://www.challenges.fr/entr... [challenges.fr]
One thing very different there than Amazon is that 2/3rds of the then employees were public servants because of how FT was privatized. Which is to say the costs of layoffs were probably super high. But even so these guys were down right misanthropic about it.
In the the US the dire
Eff you, Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
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You enjoy throwing money away? I find Amazon to be more expensive than most other retailers. They offer convenience but half the shit they peddle is from a third party who buys something for $10 from Walmart and then marks it up to $20.
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You enjoy throwing money away? I find Amazon to be more expensive than most other retailers. They offer convenience but half the shit they peddle is from a third party who buys something for $10 from Walmart and then marks it up to $20.
So buy your sex toys elsewhere
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I never had Prime, and I deleted my Amazon account. Right now, I use Amazon as a catalog to search for things I'm interested in buying. When I find the specific thing, I know the exact make and model to search for to buy on non-Amazon sites... ideally from the manufacturer, but if not, then from some other reseller.
Thanks, Amazon! You make a great product search engine.
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Thanks, Amazon! You make a great product search engine.
Not really. Try searching for something not in stock. Even with exact wording, you get the dark pattern of not showing you it's out of stock and instead recommending some Chinese dollar vendor's piece of shit knockoff.
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Well, normally I only search Amazon if I want "some kind of widget". If I know precisely the widget I want, I don't bother searching Amazon.
And it's usually fairly obvious which products are real and which are crappy knockoffs.
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And so (Score:2)
Amazon needs unions at all levels! (Score:2)
Amazon needs unions at all levels!
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they hire foreign workers to make this impossible. hiring foreign workers is the equivalent of hiring scabs during a strike.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com]
Severance is expected if asked to relocate (Score:2)
This may be fine legally as severance is only something that companies offer voluntarily, subject to a severance policy that they write themselves, so I'm sure they have a loophole in it for that. But I've never heard of any other US big tech employer doing that: this just reinforces the impression that Amazon is the worst employer among its big tech peers for tech worke
You an't tell people to resign. Corporate cons. (Score:3)
You can't tell someone to resign. You can fire them, make them redundant - sure, but the initiative needs to come from your side as a business. You can't tell people to resign. If someone did resign like this, they'd be willfully giving up their severance because severance pay is not due unless it's the business terminating employment. Amazon is simply trying to con people into giving up their rights for their own benefit.
HP did the same thing (Score:2)
Employees were told to move to Texas. If not, they assumed they didn't want to work for the company anymore. If you quit, no unemployment.
Passive-aggressive layoffs through added misery (Score:2)
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Fuck corporations. Tech people and others should quit ASAP and form worker-owned co-ops to supplant and replace the technofascist billionaires' empires of greed.
Commies & Socialists everywhere MUST LUV U /sarcasm
the consequences of hiring H1b slave labor (Score:1)
hiring foreigners is the equivalent to hiring scabs during a strike. ur company doesn't have to care about u when they can easily just replace u with a foreign worker.
having to compete with the world for jobs is a race to the bottom for the worker.
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(the old) bernie sanders on open borders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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journal articles:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://journals.sagepub.com/d... [sagepub.com]
have you no employment rights? (Score:2)
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You can refuse to resign. They will then likely fire you. The government does not force employers to hire people and keep them employed.
If you are fired or lose your job from layoffs then you may file for unemployment benefits. You then get a much lower income while you look for a new job. However, many people treat this as a low-paid vacation since the benefits can last for 6+ months. If you quit, then you generally cannot get these benefits.
Getting unemployment after being fired is more difficult and scru
dodged a bullet (Score:2)
I was seriously considering a job posting at Amazon in 2020 that had a posted income +bonus that would have been 3 times my pay at the time. I figured it wouldn't last that long though and they'd likely lay me off within a year or so. They now have a reputation to pay well but many may be lucky to be employed there more than 2-3 years, unless they do 70+ hour weeks or get lucky to be placed in the perfect function.
Is forced resignation legal? (Score:3)
I know that employee protection laws in the USA are dystopian, but can a company force you to resign? Wouldn't they need to fire you instead?
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Dystopia (Score:2)
USA worships almost unfettered capitalism, which is why they are such a rich country but at the expense of their less capable citizens.
USA has insanely poor worker rights (termination, sick pay, mandatory paid holidays) and a completely broken health care system with outrageous expenses and second world public infrastructure. But.. in conversations I’ve had with Americans they kind of go meh, to any change.
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You think the government should force you to hire someone and keep them employed???? That's pretty crazy.
The US healthcare system isn't broken. It's just expensive. 15% of my income goes into healthcare insurance and 33% goes into taxes. Only the lower class have bad healthcare because they cannot afford insurance. They prefer to have iPhones, nice TVs, video games, nicer cars, etc.. Then there are people who are below poverty which can barely afford food or rent. These people cannot afford healthcare at al
Amazon Master/Slave relationship (Score:2)
Not exactly legal here in Canada... (Score:2)
Moving people's place of work more than some fairly short distance - like 50km or 100km, constitutes constructive dismissal, and will legally trigger severance - which us usually 1 month pay for each complete year of service. Any employer offering less than that usually gets slapped down hard if it makes it to court.
Of course most states in the US have next to 0 worker protection of any kind (along with no health care). It never ceases to amaze me that anyone thinks a Canadian would want to have Canada join