Leaked messages show Amazon will force a ‘voluntary resignation’ on employees failing to relocate near their team ‘hubs’::undefined
Sounds like the solution is to say, “Yes,” then never show up onsite. Make them fire you, so you’re entitled to unemployment benefits and any severance.
No. The solution is to call their bullshitnout.
A company can’t hire you to work from one location (regardless if it’s WFH or not,) and then unilaterally decide to have you relocate.
“You can apply internally” or anything else that is a new contract doesn’t matter. They’re changing the terms of employment, and they can’t do that unilaterally.
The choices are to agree with their new terms, accept the “out” of taking another position in your area, or reject them. They can use what ever semantics they want, but it’s still a layoff.
A company can’t hire you to work from one location (regardless if it’s WFH or not,) and then unilaterally decide to have you relocate.
In the use US, with at-will employment, they absolutely can. Terminating someone for not relocating is absolutely legal. And, barring contract or law to the contrary, severance is not required.
This state of things are what happens when you remove unions from the workforce, and why companies like Amazon absolutely flip their shit when union talk starts.
Well, yes. But then they trigger unemployment. The can’t here is that they’re trying to avoid that.
In the us, you have to pay unemployment if they’re not terminated for cause. And refusing to locate is not an “acceptable” cause, so it comes to be an at-will termination (ie “we’re firing you because we can.”)
Also, the jobs they’re talking about usually come with severance packages. It’s not the warehouse gig workers
You know how a lot of job applications say something like “Have you ever been fired?”. That is a pretty strong filter.
Constructive dismissal isn’t the same thing as being fired for cause, regardless of whether Amazon tries to lie about it.
You just say “no. And then explain the actual situation in the interview.
And no engineering job I’ve ever applied for has had me fill out an “application”. That’s not a thing. And if some place weirdly has it, then send your resume somewhere else.
And no engineering job I’ve ever applied for has had me fill out an “application”. That’s not a thing. And if some place weirdly has it, then send your resume somewhere else.
You mean you’ve never filled out one of those web forms asking like how many years of experience you have with X technology, what is your expected salary, when is your earliest start date, etc? When job hunting earlier this year I’ve found those to be incredibly common.
Voluntary resignation = termination. You should still qualify for unemployment.
I WFH permanantly , for a company named after a river. They can’t do that to me , why? Because I live in Europe were we have unions and collective bargaining. That’s the only difference , and it makes a big difference.
Is there a Canadian (or ideally an international) org similar to this? Remote work is global. I’ve worked with two fully remote companies in the past three years and my colleages are literally everywhere. I’ve seen mass layoffs personally, followed by onboarding thousands of contractors in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. We all know remote workers in less developed regions are training the AI being deployed. and moderating our content. Etc etc.
Would love to see this labor movement go global. Remote work is connected and networked, inherently. I don’t know if I’ll see a global workers movement in my lifetime but I fucking hope I do (I’m pretty old).
You say this but there’s a reason our tech salaries are way way higher than most other countries.
An Amazon tech worker on average will make 250 to 450k total comp a year.
Anyone working for these big companies in the engineering fields is easily making 300k a year and up after rsu. Those salaries dont exist in Europe. Some companies offer close in the UK etc but… That’s why people stay in the us.
Also if we don’t like our salary we just go hop to another place for a raise.
The us sucks for people without an in demand skill like basic laborers or unskilled workers. It’s amazing for folks in a market with demand.
(Source I hire and work in both regions. And have looked for ways to move to the eu region.)
I honestly enjoy your contribution. Perfectly showcases the disregard for people who are judged to not contribute enough to be deserving of a humane quality of living despite performing tasks that need to be done.
A very american look on people.
There is no such thing as an unskilled worker. All jobs require skill that you learn before or during the job. Most of these skills do not command high salaries but I prefer underpaid laborer or lower working class to unskilled.
I understand the value of working in an office, but I wish our society would choose to pursue improving the quality of our lives instead of increasing productive capacity. It’s never enough. These companies always want more.
We can do our jobs just fine, even great, at home. But they want to squeeze everything out of their workers.
It’s not about the benefits of going to an office. It’s all about corporate realestate. Companies and rich people have a lot of money invested in office buildings and they are all losing value.
There are also huge swathes of middle managers who cannot justify the existence of their job if all the peasants are free to work from wherever. Who’s gonna judge you for being 3 minutes late and not in dress code as you sit and type?
I think for a lot of engineers, their productivity would be much higher at home. In the office you have way more distractions and time wasters, like coworkers, physical meetings, etc. Even if employees at home are scrolling social media, they’re going to procrastinate in office too, just in a different way, whether that’s just sitting and doing nothing or going out for lunch on a really long break.
Yeah this is the part I don’t get. We are always arguing about whether productivity is highest with wfh or wfo. But we never discuss what maximizes people’s happiness. Which seems more important to me, why are we doing any of this anyway? Capitalism I guess.
I work at an NGO and you could argue that they are ‘one of the good ones’. They work us into the ground from the goodness in their hearts. The motivation at C-suite is that they want to get as much work done as possible because it seems important. If your job helps to save lives then you want to be really efficient. Profit companies have different goals but the motivation to improve efficiency remains.
Technology enables it. As productive as my company is today I know that we are well behind where we could be. Recent developments in AI have set a brand new horizon to reach towards. These forces aren’t going away anytime soon. It makes you want to move faster.
We need to incentivize companies to put more money into people. I think this is something that government has the power to do. There is definitely a way to make sure a company hires two people, pays them salary of two people, and they do the job of one person by working 25 hours a week.
I understand the value of working in an office
I don’t, but I’m also a sysadmin. Offices are my hell.
It’s never enough. These companies always want more.
The entire system is designed to demand more every year. If they don’t show year-over-year increases in revenue then stock investors dump the stocks, the company loses value, and it’s considered a failing company, even if the revenue and performance is already enough to sustain a billion people for a thousand years. Enough is not enough, the system demands more.
Amazon started enforcing its so-called “return-to-hub” policy in recent weeks, according to an internal email and Slack messages obtained by Insider. Hubs are the central locations assigned to each individual team — employees will have to work out of those hubs instead of any office nearest to their current city.
Amazon assigned offices for most individual employees, but not the whole team. Some employees told Insider that made office work pointless because many still had to use video calls to connect with their teammates spread across the country.
Why does Amazon even bother to do this? Why force their employees back to office if they’ll going to work remotely with their distributed team anyway? Why not save money on office space by letting those employees to work from their home?
Why not save money on office space by letting those employees to work from their home?
Because they can’t control them at home.
I’ve never felt more under control by the company I worked for than when my team was all on a Slack channel even though we were all WFH.
Just curious, how does being in a Slack channel feel more like being controlled than being in an office?
They bought a ton of real estate over the years.
Then places like Seattle were literally falling a part without the added cash cow of commuters stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for 16 hours of a workday.
https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2020/06/24/2020-project-pause-en/
It did survive and survived better than others: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/seattle-fared-better-than-expected-in-the-pandemic-economy/
But theres no pussyfooting about it. Shit was bad and we are still in a hard recovery from it. Almost like our cities are suffering from their own form of Long Covid.
