one month later Amazon has ordered its company employees to return to the office, some of whom have already returned. Protests took place outside the company’s headquarters in Seattle today and Amazon’s offices in several other cities. The staff is protest The mission goes back to Amazon’s office and lacks meaningful progress towards its Climate Pledge.
“My morale is at its lowest since I started here,” said one Seattle employee who started work in 2020 and survived two layoffs this year. 27,000 Amazons out of work. “People have lost faith in leadership because they have made unilateral decisions that affect the lives of workers.”
Protest organizers said more than 1,000 workers joined the rally in Seattle along with protests in other cities, bringing the total number of participants to more than 2,000. Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said Amazon estimates about 300 people attended the protest in Seattle. The company currently employs approximately 350,000 corporate and technology employees globally and approximately 65,000 employees in the Seattle area.
While there was a surge during protests and strikes by Amazon warehouse workers IN recently yearToday marks the largest protest by company workers since climate protests 2019 in which thousands of workers were laid off. It comes with tech workers across the industry still reeling from a never happend quantity lay offas companies cut back in the wake of the pandemic hiring spree.
In February, Andy Jassy, who become CEO from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, becomes the latest tech boss to announce that his employees must return to the office, requiring employees to be in-person three days a week, starting April 1. May 1. On the day of that announcement, employees set up a Slack channel to rally support for remote work and submitted a petition signed by 20,000 workers. to Amazon’s leadership asking them to reconsider the mission. Employees said the policy reversed an earlier promise that telecommuting decisions would be made by individual teams, adding that some workers had had to relocate. Amazon bosses declined the request.
That failure amplified a broader unrest also caused by Amazon’s mass layoffs and the company’s skyrocketing emissions — despite its pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The back-office Slack channel “created a place where a lot of people suddenly had a reason to talk about their grip on Amazon,” said a Los Angeles employee leaving his office today. now said. “In doing so, we realized that there was a lot in common and that the overarching theme was that Amazon was taking us backwards in many ways.”
“We’ve always listened and will continue to do so, but we’re pleased with the first month that more people returned to the office,” Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote. “There is more energy, collaboration and connection going on and we hear this from a lot of employees and businesses around our office.”
Over the past year, remote work has become a hotbed for many tech workers, who have become fond of the flexibility it offers during the pandemic and, in some cases, have organized their lives to be free to live away from the tech hubs.
