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Reply to Inside the Employee Revolt Rocking Amazon by brooklynlad

Inside the Employee Revolt Rocking Amazon

  • Management is bungling an effort to return workers to the office, some employees say

On Monday, as Amazon’s corporate employees were griping about an abrupt change to its remote-work policies, a company vice president sent an email to their team in an effort to tamp down the uprising. The email acknowledged the workers’ frustration, a person familiar with its contents said. Then it took a bizarre turn.

The vice president instructed an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot called ChatGPT to create an imaginary “story about important and organic learnings in the work place,” in an apparent attempt at inspiration.

The chatbot spat out a fairy tale of sorts, which began, painfully, with, “There was once a small software development team…” The story and its protagonist, a project manager named Jane, did not ease the employees’ discontent.

“If you’re trying to put a human face on a thing and say, ‘We understand what you’re going through,’ maybe don’t ask a robot,” one current employee told The Daily Beast, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal events.

Thousands Petition Amazon

Thousands of Amazon staffers are resisting the return-to-office mandate, which was announced Friday and is set to go into effect on May 1. As of early Wednesday afternoon, more than 20,000 people had joined a Slack channel to discuss the change, while roughly 10,000 people had signed a petition calling for CEO Andy Jassy to reverse course.

The new policy “caught everyone by surprise,” another current employee said. Just days earlier, Amazon held an all-hands meeting but made no mention of the shift. When Jassy finally announced the new policy, he did so by quietly posting a memo to the company intranet, according to multiple workers.

“They just snuck it on,” said one employee, who found out about the memo because “someone on my team just happened to look at it.” (An Amazon spokesperson said a push notification was sent out when the letter was posted.) Comments on the memo were also disabled, multiple staffers added, and even some high-level managers seemingly didn’t know about the new policy in advance.

Once news spread, an employee recalled, “immediately all of our internal slacks just started blowing up, like, ‘No, we’re not going back.’”

While some workers were excited to have more face-to-face encounters, many were angry, having seized on Amazon’s previously relaxed policies to make major life choices, according to four current employees. “People had to make decisions, and the decisions were like, fuck it, we’re buying houses. We’re putting our kids in school,” one of them said.

Some staffers, the employee claimed, were recruited during the pandemic with the understanding that they would have minimal required days in the office.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Amazon said, “We believe being in the office together reinforces our culture, fosters collaboration and invention, creates learning opportunities, and builds more connected teams. As a company with hundreds of thousands of corporate employees, we know any decision we make around how and where we work will invite differing opinions and we respect the right of employees to share those opinions with one another and with leadership.”

In October 2021—Jassy’s most recent update to staff about remote work—he announced that the company planned to leave decisions about office attendance “to individual teams,” rather than enacting a blanket policy. Last September, he publicly stated that Amazon did not “have a plan to require people to come back,” though he said the company planned to “proceed adaptively as we learn.”

While Jassy’s latest update acknowledged that implementation “won’t be perfect at first,” and left room for a “small minority” of exceptions, to some staffers it marked a stark reversal—and betrayal.

“Everyone’s just like, how do we trust these people anymore?” one employee said.

“The emotional reaction I have, which is a feeling of frustration and anger, is we’ve all been through so much over the last three years,” the person continued. “We also fundamentally restructured how we work, and we prioritized different things… And I think in many ways there was a bit of a workers’ revolution.”

The employee questioned whether Amazon’s new approach will be enforceable: “What are they going to do, come pick me up at my house and make me come to work?” Another staffer suspected that lenient managers may refuse to mark their workers absent if they don’t show up three times in a week.

Amid the frustration, another theory is brewing among some disgruntled workers: that the new mandate was designed—or at least motivated—by a desire to encourage more employees to quit, thereby reducing overhead without needing to pay severance. Workers have already endured two major rounds of layoffs since the fall.

“This is how they’re going to get rid of another 10 or 20,000 people,” an employee told The Daily Beast. (An Amazon spokesperson said that “any suggestion that this guidance is intended to drive attrition is simply not true.”)

Either way, the speculation signals depleted employee morale, and brewing distrust against Amazon’s leadership.

“It kind of feels like the Hunger Games,” one weary staffer said.

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Reply to Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip by brooklynlad

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Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip

  • Stock-heavy compensation plan means employees to receive 15% to 50% below projected pay targets

The steep decline in Amazon.com Inc.’s stock over the past year is roiling the technology company’s stock-heavy compensation plan, resulting in employee pay coming in significantly lower than target compensation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amazon pays its corporate employees a large chunk of their annual salaries in restricted stock units, and a prolonged slump in the company’s shares is causing pay for 2023 to be between 15% and 50% lower than the projected targets Amazon gave to employees, some of the people said.

“Our compensation model is intended to encourage employees to think like owners, which is why it connects total compensation to the company’s long-term performance,” an Amazon spokesman said in an emailed statement. “That model comes with some year-to-year upside and risk because the stock price can fluctuate, but historically at Amazon, it’s had a history of working out very well for people who’ve taken a long-term view."

Amazon has historically given less base-pay compensation to employees than its big-tech peers but made up the difference with stock awards that vest over several years. Employees say the longer an Amazon employee stays with the company, the more their compensation can depend on stock awards, with stocks making up 50% or more of total income for some.

Over the past year, Amazon’s shares have declined more than 35% amid a broader technology slowdown and slower growth on Amazon’s retail side of the business. When Amazon issues restricted stock units to employees, it is predicated on the longstanding assumption shared in compensation conversations that Amazon’s shares would appreciate at least 15% each year, the people said.

Until recently, that had largely been true. Between 2017 and early 2022, the stock price increased on average about 30% each year. But Amazon’s stock is currently trading around $96 per share and some employee pay packages are structured under the assumption that Amazon’s shares would be around $170 per share, some of the people said.

Because of the decline, Amazon’s human-resources team recently sent training documents to managers about how to communicate what effectively amounts to a pay cut to its employees, according to training materials reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. According to the materials, managers should focus on employees being invested in the long-term performance of the company and hold on to the restricted stock longer until there is a recovery in the company’s stock price.

At a recent all-hands meeting at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy addressed the situation, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Journal. “I know that this is and feels like a really difficult time. We have a very uncertain economy, we just had to say goodbye to 18,000 of our teammates, the market is in a funky spot,” he said, adding that Amazon and other companies have seen an impact on their stock prices. “The result is compensations are impacted. And that is difficult. All of that is difficult. But I am quite optimistic that we have the chance to emerge from this challenging time in a relatively stronger position than we entered it.”

Last year, amid a war for talent and a slumping stock price, Amazon raised the cap for the cash component of Amazon salaries from $160,000 to $350,000. This year, the company plans on issuing raises from 1% to 4%, according to some of the people. The company won’t issue more restricted stock to employees to help them meet their target compensation for this year, some of the people said.

Amazon is in the midst of one of the toughest financial stretches in the company’s history. In November, it began the largest round of layoffs the company has ever deployed as Amazon adjusted to weakening retail demand coupled with years of mass hiring. By January, the company had laid off 18,000 corporate employees, the highest number of any technology company in this recent wave of layoffs.

The number added to other cuts made across the tech industry. Companies large and small have laid off workers in recent months, including at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Since the start of the year, more than 107,000 employees have been laid off across the tech sector, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs.

In addition to eliminating current positions, Amazon also rescinded job offers from some candidates who had accepted them and hadn’t yet started, and delayed the start date for some incoming college hires by six months. The Information earlier reported the rescinded offers.

“As part of our annual operating plan review process and in light of the challenging economic conditions, we made the difficult decisions to eliminate some roles in particular businesses for which we had extended offers but the candidates had not yet joined the company, and to delay start dates for some of our college hires by up to six months,” said the Amazon spokesman in a statement.

The company recently announced plans to require workers to be in the office at least three days a week by May 1, shifting from a policy that enabled team directors to decide how often staff would be in the office.

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Reply to New York City to Open Migrant Shelter at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal by brooklynlad

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New York City to Open Migrant Shelter at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (01-21-23)

  • The shelter will temporarily accommodate about 1,000 single men until cruise season begins in the spring.

With New York City at “its breaking point,” Mayor Eric Adams announced on Saturday that the city would open a new emergency shelter at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal to help accommodate the influx of migrants.

The relief center will serve some 1,000 single, adult men, Mr. Adams said, a similar capacity to a tent facility that the city had placed on Randalls Island until it shut down last fall after operating for just a month.

The new center will also have a short shelf life: Mr. Adams said it will close ahead of cruise season this spring.

“With more than 41,000 asylum seekers arriving in New York City since last spring and nearly 28,000 asylum seekers currently in our care, our city is at its breaking point,” the mayor told reporters on Saturday.

He added: “We continue to surpass both our moral and legal obligations and meet the needs of people arriving in New York, but as the number of asylum seekers continues to grow, we are in serious need of support from both our state and federal governments.”

The first occupants will be relocated from the Watson Hotel in Midtown Manhattan; the cruise terminal will also house newly arriving adult men as space allows. The Watson Hotel will then be used to serve families with children who are seeking asylum.

The announcement was criticized by advocacy groups, particularly for the choice of location: far from the subway, close to wintry waterfront winds and in a high-risk flood zone, according to the city’s maps.

The emergency center “will needlessly expose future residents to the elements during some of the coldest months of the year,” the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said in a joint statement. The city last year had proposed the first location for an emergency center on Orchard Beach in the Bronx, but it halted construction and abandoned the idea when the site flooded during a rainstorm.

“Hotels have always been the better short-term option, in contrast to erecting tents in inaccessible parts of New York City that are prone to flooding,” the groups added. “Continuing to move asylum seekers around the boroughs like chess pieces is callous and indicative of City Hall’s failure to competently manage this crisis.”

Mr. Adams has made the immigration crisis a focal point of his administration in recent months, and he has stepped up his campaign in the last few days. He visited El Paso last weekend, in part to increase pressure on President Biden to provide federal help to New York City.

The mayor then traveled to Washington, where he used an appearance at the U.S. Conference of Mayors and an interview with Politico to press his message.

“There is no more room,” Mr. Adams told Politico. “It’s not that we’re getting to that point. We’re at that point, and I wanted to be clear with New Yorkers of what we’re facing, how this is going to impact every city service that we deliver to New Yorkers.”

The arrival of tens of thousands of migrants in New York has overwhelmed city services and has cost $300 million so far, a figure the Adams administration has said could ultimately rise to $2 billion. New York City recently proposed a $103 billion budget with planned cuts in anticipation of future deficits.

The federal government has already approved $800 million in grants for states, local government and nongovernmental organizations dealing with the increase in migrants. Much of the aid is expected to flow to New York City.

Part of the issue is that the city cannot move people from the shelter system, which is already overwhelmed, to permanent affordable housing, of which there is not enough. According to the most recent city data, there are a record 69,075 people in the city’s shelter system, including about 24,000 asylum seekers.

This fall, after the city’s main shelter system population hit a record, the city built the Randalls Island tent facility to handle an expected increase of arrivals. It was dismantled after the Biden administration placed new restrictions on who could cross the border, causing the migrant flow to slow to a trickle.

A proposal to house migrants on cruise ships was also abandoned after criticism that the asylum seekers would be isolated. Mr. Adams’s office insisted that the new plan would house migrants in the terminal, not on the ships themselves.

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