Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-lets-managers-terminate-employees-return-to-office-2023-10
Amazon tells managers they can now fire employees who won’t come into the office 3 times a week::Amazon shared new guidelines that give managers a template for terminating employees over RTO.
While this is totally shitty. What does this have to do with technology?
We are talking about Amazon corporate decisions, not Amazon technology solutions or anything, why is this here?
Amazon is a company in the technology sector. They might be a retailer but they are also a part of big tech and the foundation of much of the Internet. A large portion of their workforce are tech workers.
Articles like this are not focused on warehouse employees, they have to go into the office to do their jobs at all. This article is talking about people who don’t have to go into work to perform their job… Like tech workers.
So like it or not, this is tech news.
I’m afraid I simply don’t agree, Technology news, and news about people who have tech jobs are not exclusively the same thing. I get your point of view but it just doesn’t feel like it belongs here.
I think this community needs to have clear cut rules on what is and isn’t technology (as far as the admins decide.), and whatever they is ill shut up and follow it. Otherwise people like. E will continue to downvote this stuff as it simply doesn’t seem appropriate.
You literally have to use technology to use Amazon so I think that qualifies right?
By that logic literally everything posted on the internet is “technology” which… it isn’t.
So no, this doesn’t count.
This is a tangent, but you ever think about how arbitrary the week structure is? Like, if weeks were 6 or 8 days long, it would be a big shift in work-life balance regardless of how you split the days up. But thousands of years ago we decided on 7 and it just kind of stuck.
Assuming 8 hour days, here are some different splits for on and off:
I got a 4 ten hour day schedule with 3 days off and I MUCH prefer it over 5 eight hour days. Having a whole extra day off easily makes up for working ten hours IMO.
I used to have a rolling 4 ten week, so Monday off one week then Tuesday the following etc. The best part was the week you have Friday the next you have Monday so it’s a 4 day weekend every month. But the job was so fucking boring and they’d still come around every day 9 hours into the shift asking if you wanted to do 2 hours overtime… So 4 days was basically work, go home, shower, eat, sleep repeat. I personally need some wind down time each day but I can definitely see how some people would like this setup
I had the option for 4x10 and turned that down. I’m barely useful after 8 hours. I can’t imagine 2 extra hours a day.
7 isn’t random. A lunar cycle (ever wondered where the word month comes from - the moon of course) is 28 days. Aka exactly 4 weeks.
The reasoning behind a specific system may not be arbitrary, but why is one system better than another? People have also used 8 day systems, and 10 day systems. It would seem to me that biggest reason it is still in use today is “it’s the way we’ve always done it”. The inertia of the 7-day system makes change very hard, though there have been attempts over the last few centuries by both France and the Soviet Union. So, even if you could scientifically prove that some other system would be more productive, you would have a very hard time implementing it.
The idea that I will work a few percentage points more or less over my life, as a direct result of the phases of the moon, is, while perhaps technically correct, a fundamentally silly reason.
Fuck these scum. End the monopoly and make wfh an environmental policy
Where’s the non paywall version of this?
Ok so cancel Amazon Prime. Got it.
I’ve been back in the office since June 2020. Not by choice either.
I envy these people
Every single time you go to that job, it was your choice.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This conversation will 1) reinforce that return to office 3+ days a week is a requirement of their job, and 2) explain that continued non-compliance without a legitimate reason may lead to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of your employment," the guidelines said.
First announced in February, Amazon’s return-to-office process has been unusually contentious, with more than 30,000 employees signing an internal petition and many others walking out earlier this year in opposition to it.
Employees have expressed frustration because they were hired as fully remote workers during the pandemic and they see the current mandate as a shift from a policy allowing individual leaders to determine how their teams worked.
In an email to Insider, Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was seeing “more energy, connection, and collaboration” with the vast majority of employees in the office more frequently.
In the guidelines, Amazon encourages managers to “assume positive intent” and “make high-judgment decisions” regarding individual situations, such as ascertaining whether employees have missed attendance requirements because they’re on paid time off or at home because of an illness.
If the noncompliance continues, managers should conduct follow-up discussions within a couple of weeks, where they have to reinforce the three-times-a-week attendance policy and explain possible disciplinary action that includes “termination of your employment.”
The original article contains 832 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
3 times? My work will soon start making us come in 4 days a week and before the pandemic that was never an expectation. If it was a tough week to go in I had the freedom to work at home a few days and nobody but my manager gave a damn when I was there and when I wasn’t.
random_character_a@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s all about unused office space and it’s value.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I keep hearing people making this argument.
Is the assumption that Amazon is ignoring their finance dept and that this is driven by the sunk cost fallacy? “We dumped a bunch of money into this, therefore we should continue to move forward with it.”
I ask because the appraised value of property is based on what other’s will likely pay for it. If no one else is wants to pay a lot of money for my office space, it doesn’t matter if I have 1 employees or 10,000 employees in that building.
Infynis@midwest.social 1 year ago
A lot of companies have long-term contracts for these office spaces that they can’t get out of, so whether or not their workers are using the space, they have to pay for it. They should really just write it off as a loss, but I’m not too familiar with how that works. Maybe they can’t.
dtjones@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think you have the right idea but came to the wrong conclusion. Why would anyone buy office space if there is no value in employees coming to the office? Hint: they wouldn’t.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 1 year ago
I left a job in France (the base company is American) partly because of this stupid rule (3 days at the office) they tried to push. Our contracts give us the right to 2 days only. There was absolutely no need at all to do it but the managers were all on it like flies on a turd. 4 days was like their wet dream.
IMO it was all about control locally, but the USA base company “asked for it” which means way different things in the USA and the EU (in France you can’t just order people around that way or fire them ‘on a whim’), but they sure jumped on it like it was free abuse day for psychopaths.
Helped me leave that toxic environment though, gotta see the silver lining right!