We’ve got ourselves an old-fashioned Wild West standoff going on in Seattle. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and his executive team are on one side. They want employees to come back to the office to work. On the other side is the jammy and sweatpants-wearing brigade of workers who are digging in and demanding they be allowed to do their jobs from their kitchen, basement, garage, bedroom, bathroom, or den for as long as they want.
Make no mistake, thousands of these employees believe a professional office is no place to get corporate work done, no sir. Some are threatening to quit, and others are drafting petitions to make their point known. According to Insider, there is an internal Slack channel at Amazon called “Remote Advocacy.” It had over 14,000 members as of Tuesday.
It all started when Jassy sent a memo to workers Friday that said the company believes “teams tend to find ways to work through hard and complex trade-offs faster” when they work in an office. In the same location. That doesn’t seem so ridiculous since it’s worked pretty well for a rather long time before the lockdowns.
Almost 80% of workers said they would look for another job if forced to go to the office.
Now keep in mind how ridiculously pathetic these employees at Amazon look; Jassy was only saying they wanted employees to come to the office three days a week. Not five. Jassy might secretly be hoping the hundreds or thousands of weak employees he has actually do quit. The company has already eliminated 18,000 employees in the past few months. There could be many more who won’t have to worry about quitting.
Here’s what one employee wrote on the Slack chat. “This is going to be absolute chaos and make everyone’s work distracted for probably a quarter, maybe longer. It’s hard to be productive with so much uncertainty injected into our lives.”
Here’s some wording from the petition. “We, the undersigned Amazonians, are responding by petitioning for the right to choose where to to work, including remote locations. Insider reports that 56% of Amazon employees want to come to the office once per month, and 31% said they could be troubled by going to the office once or twice weekly.
Wow. Thank goodness Amazon delivery drivers aren’t cut from this cloth, or 95% of the packages you order would never get out of the warehouse.
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