More than 500 employees at Amazon’s cloud computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January.
In a letter sent last Wednesday to Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, 523 employees protested the upcoming return-to-office mandate and urged Amazon executives to restore remote work flexibility.
“By taking this action, AWS is failing to realize its full potential and creating a bleak outlook for its future,” read the letter shared with The Seattle Times. “While it is absolutely true that flexible and remote working poses challenges, we have always been a company that solves problems in new, exciting and innovative ways, rather than relying on outdated approaches that worked well in the past.
“The cloud computing industry that we base our work and livelihoods on today might not exist today if we had adhered to this restrictive thinking from the beginning. »
The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate, in effect since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the original three-day-a-week mandate . too, but Amazon has not changed course. About 15 months later, office work requirements were increased in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms.
The employee letter follows Garman’s comments at a recent AWS town hall meeting, where the new CEO told employees that if they didn’t want to comply with the five-day-a-week mandate, there was d other businesses around.
In an interview with The Seattle Times last week, Garman reiterated his comments, confirming that he supported the new policy and believed employees worked better when they were 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… It’s the employees who can call.
“It won’t be perfect for everyone. I’m sure there will be a handful or a number of people who opt out,” he said.
Amazon’s current mandate of three days a week hasn’t worked as the company had hoped, Garman said, because workers were often in the office on different days. He said 9 out of 10 people he spoke with are “actually very excited about this change.”
Garman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said there was some flexibility under the new policy, such as asking managers to stay home all day to work on an individual project or to let in a dryer repair technician.
In Wednesday’s letter, AWS employees said Garman’s comments were “inconsistent with the experiences of many employees.”
“You silence critical perspectives and, in doing so, damage our culture and our future,” the workers wrote.
In the letter, the workers said Amazon executives failed to base their decision on data, which went against one of Amazon’s principles, and that the new mandate would be a step falling behind Amazon’s stated goal of becoming “the best employer on the planet.”
The new policy would disproportionately affect workers who rely on the flexibility of remote work, including those with disabilities or caring responsibilities, and workers on visas who could not risk losing their jobs.
It would also lead to the departure of higher-level employees who have the resumes and finances to seek new employment, making it harder for Amazon to create the type of collaborative environment it seeks, they said. value the workers.
Amazon spokeswoman Margaret Callahan said Thursday “we understand this may be a transition for some employees, which is why we are sharing these guidelines now, well in advance of expecting employees to work in the office as they did before the pandemic.
Amazon offers employees “a number of resources” to prepare for change, Callahan continued, including access to “senior care options” and pet daycare.
The new return-to-office policy, announced in September and expected to take effect Jan. 2, will set Amazon apart from most of its tech competitors and most other Seattle employers, which have opted for less stringent requirements.
Last week, Starbucks joined Amazon in taking a hard line against those unwilling to comply with its return-to-office policy. Starbucks is requiring company employees to be in the office three days a week starting in January, saying in a recent memo that workers could comply or find new jobs.
Amazon employees launched a similar protest in early 2023 after the company announced it would require workers to be in the office three days a week. Beginning with letters and petitions, the effort culminated in a daylong strike, in which workers rallied on Zoom and outside Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to demand that the company reconsiders his decision.
In the recent letter, AWS employees again asked Garman and other Amazon executives to rethink the policy and their stance on working in the office.
“Remote and flexible work are an opportunity for Amazon to lead, not a threat,” the employees wrote. “We want to work for a company and for leaders who recognize and seize this moment to challenge us to reinvent the way we work. »
