Business Insider reports that some Amazon employees have noticed an increasing number of colleagues are leaving the company over its strict return-to-office mandate.
Amazon’s strict return-to-office policy is pushing more employees into quitting::undefined
Amazon has always been hostile to it’s employees. The culture of “step up or fuck off” permeates the entire organization, from warehouses to executives.
They’ve even had meetings where they express worry over running out of a viable pool of people to hire from. Because they know they are abusive AF and working for them is miserable, so turnover is extremely high. At some point turnover could surpass a population’s ability to absorb it.
It’s economics, but with people as the commodity being valued.
Amazon currently has a wide labor pool to pull from, and so the value of any individual person is very low. As they saturate the market with people who are bitter and angry about working for Amazon, the pool will shrink, in this case, faster than the rate they lose people. There is a critical point where the growth of the “will never work for Amazon” pool of people will grow exponentially, and as they struggle to hire replacements, workplace conditions will improve. They will not improve before that moment, however.
Because Amazon doesn’t see people as people. They see people as a resource to extract value from.
This isn’t a problem unique to Amazon, everyone reading this can probably name at least one company they’ve worked for that did something similar, but Amazon is an outlier for how aggressively they’ve embraced that idea.
This is a problem endemic to capitalism, as Amazon succeeds, more companies will be forced to adopt those practices on order to compete. Reducing the options people have to avoid Amazon like conditions, and lowering the bar for acceptable workplace culture.
The only defense we have against this is to unionize. Aggressively. The current push should look like nothing more than a warning shot.
If you can organize your workplace and get 75% of the employees in the union, you can write your own check. At a word, 75% of the workforce walking out absolutely cripples any employer. They know that, they don’t want the union because they don’t want you to have any power in the relationship. It’s your life, and they want the keys to it. Take the keys back.
This is a problem inherent to capitalism. It only seeks to raise capital and will exploit every resource to do so. As soon as a resource is no longer useful, it is discarded.
True, yes, I think so, too. Though I have heard working for AWS is brutal for a white collar job. Obviously not as bad as being a driver or warehouse person.
I work with it enough as a customer to know how astonishingly broad and deep all the various AWS products and services are. You’d think they’d treat those employees better than they do. That platform is way ahead of the competition.
I worked in support for 3 and a half years and the best part of the job was the people I worked with. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.
But they all had the same complaints, incorrect metric measuring, making the workplace hostile by creating a system that pitts people against each other, making what was once a collaborative workspace into a competitive one.
They didn’t use the stick until you were shown to not be able to catch the carrot, and every few months they moved that carrot forward a few inches, making sure you had to work 4x as hard to meet your metrics.
My friends say that over the last 5 years it’s become a shit place to work.
Just go to youtube and lookup videos of programmer youtubers. Everything revolves around “FAANG”. Facebook, Amazon, Air-bnb, netflix and google. They would drown a puppy to be able to work at these places. I don’t get it as it honestly seems very boring and stressful to me.
Edit: just curious why people are downvoting me. I cant honestly see where i was wrong. A lot of programmers i see would love to work for these corporations. Some purely make videos about preparing for interviews for these specific companies. Or is it because i said it seemed boring?
Amazon has always been hostile to it’s employees. The culture of “step up or fuck off” permeates the entire organization, from warehouses to executives.
They’ve even had meetings where they express worry over running out of a viable pool of people to hire from. Because they know they are abusive AF and working for them is miserable, so turnover is extremely high. At some point turnover could surpass a population’s ability to absorb it.
And then the problem will correct itself.
It’s economics, but with people as the commodity being valued.
Amazon currently has a wide labor pool to pull from, and so the value of any individual person is very low. As they saturate the market with people who are bitter and angry about working for Amazon, the pool will shrink, in this case, faster than the rate they lose people. There is a critical point where the growth of the “will never work for Amazon” pool of people will grow exponentially, and as they struggle to hire replacements, workplace conditions will improve. They will not improve before that moment, however.
Because Amazon doesn’t see people as people. They see people as a resource to extract value from.
This isn’t a problem unique to Amazon, everyone reading this can probably name at least one company they’ve worked for that did something similar, but Amazon is an outlier for how aggressively they’ve embraced that idea.
This is a problem endemic to capitalism, as Amazon succeeds, more companies will be forced to adopt those practices on order to compete. Reducing the options people have to avoid Amazon like conditions, and lowering the bar for acceptable workplace culture.
The only defense we have against this is to unionize. Aggressively. The current push should look like nothing more than a warning shot.
If you can organize your workplace and get 75% of the employees in the union, you can write your own check. At a word, 75% of the workforce walking out absolutely cripples any employer. They know that, they don’t want the union because they don’t want you to have any power in the relationship. It’s your life, and they want the keys to it. Take the keys back.
Agree with everything you said. They will also aggressively replace human workers with robots, AI, etc.
These technologies should make life better for working people, but in general I fear they will not. They’ll just concentrate the wealth even faster.
This is a problem inherent to capitalism. It only seeks to raise capital and will exploit every resource to do so. As soon as a resource is no longer useful, it is discarded.
Not just Google.
We’ve had “Human Resource” departments for decades.
Preach it!
That’s mainly for their blue collar jobs afaik
True, yes, I think so, too. Though I have heard working for AWS is brutal for a white collar job. Obviously not as bad as being a driver or warehouse person.
Working for AWS is definitely not for everyone. It’s pretty rough but generally you’re treated better than Amazon retail.
I work with it enough as a customer to know how astonishingly broad and deep all the various AWS products and services are. You’d think they’d treat those employees better than they do. That platform is way ahead of the competition.
I worked in support for 3 and a half years and the best part of the job was the people I worked with. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But they all had the same complaints, incorrect metric measuring, making the workplace hostile by creating a system that pitts people against each other, making what was once a collaborative workspace into a competitive one. They didn’t use the stick until you were shown to not be able to catch the carrot, and every few months they moved that carrot forward a few inches, making sure you had to work 4x as hard to meet your metrics.
My friends say that over the last 5 years it’s become a shit place to work.
Just go to youtube and lookup videos of programmer youtubers. Everything revolves around “FAANG”. Facebook, Amazon, Air-bnb, netflix and google. They would drown a puppy to be able to work at these places. I don’t get it as it honestly seems very boring and stressful to me.
Edit: just curious why people are downvoting me. I cant honestly see where i was wrong. A lot of programmers i see would love to work for these corporations. Some purely make videos about preparing for interviews for these specific companies. Or is it because i said it seemed boring?
AirBnB? Don’t you mean Apple?
Oh its apple? How the hell did i forget about apple… 🤦🏻