It depends what’s in their contract. I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing based on zero experience of working in Amazon and am using my knowledge of European employment as a baseline. Of course, your mileage may vary in the US?
That’s the idea. It’s illegal for Amazon to fire people for not wanting to return on-site, so they do the legally allowed minimum to condition promotions based on that. Legal, but still shitty. They hired a ton of remote (by contract) workers during the pandemic and made a shit ton of profit, now they don’t know how to get rid of them without a severance package.
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 11 months ago
vinniep@lemmy.world 11 months ago
In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.
The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.
barfplanet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Employment laws are state-by-state, but I don’t know a single one where it’s illegal to fire someone for not coming into the office.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Here is the jist. They can fire you for not going to the office, but they have to fire everybody else who doesn’t go, else there they (the employee) can argue discrimination. And if we are taking a few hundreds of lawsuits, plus all the union movement they are having…
So it’s better to “gently” let the people know they are not welcomed and motivate them to go.
Tl;Dr: Apes, together, strong.
barfplanet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Do you have experience with employment law?
An employee could argue discrimination, but they’d have to have evidence that it was due to a protected class to have any success, and those cases are notoriously hard to prove. In every state that I’m aware of, they can fire people selectively for not coming into the office, while keeping others employed.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It will be up to the judge on each case to decide, I’m sure that we could see different rulings for very similar cases.
Ultimately wether they win or lose they don’t want to stir the flames, else they would have already done what you said. If it was so black and white, the penalty wouldn’t be “blocking promotions”.
Bo7a@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I’ve been in and out of these types of contracts for the last 20 years. If a position is remote then it is marked as remote in the contract. Even with the United States horrible worker protection laws, they still can’t unilaterally change a contract.
barfplanet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is true for contract workers, but I believe we’re talking about W2 employees, who rarely have a contract if they’re not part of a union.
Bo7a@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
My perspective might be skewed because I always have a contract, even when I am an internal FTE. But my circumstance is not necessarily ‘normal’ since I live in Canada but work in the US/EU far more often than at home.
DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I’m not in the US but I was hired at my current job during the pandemic and all of IT except for senior managers and up are 100% remote right now. But the contract I signed said they reserved the right to make me go back to the office at their discretion
Bo7a@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
That sucks. I would not have signed it as-is and asked for a revision.
I know that speaks to my privilege as much as anything else. But I am at the stage of my life where going back to an office is a non-starter for me, and I am confident that I would find another offer quickly after declining the contract with that kind of wording.