Amazon’s website says from April 2013 to March 2014 it had a 40% lower RIDDOR rate (the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and unsafe Occurrences Regulations as defined by the UK Health and Safety Executive) than other companies reporting in the same industry code, “Warehousing and Support Activities for Transport”. Since this gentleman had never visited a U.S. city, his belief was that encountering gun-toting criminals might be a daily occurrence.
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The American Civil Liberties Union took out a full page ad in Friday’s Seattle Times, asking Amazon employees “who believe they were unlawfully penalized” for family leave issues to contact them “to explore the possibility of legal representation”.
While I’ve worked in some trying environments, compared to the NYT version of Amazon that’s depicted as seemingly somewhere between the DMV and the Gulag, I was in the land of rainbows and unicorns. So here are my reactions to their article.
The third alternative to the prevailing labor-law debates is that employers not only wield power over workers, but that they often possess even more power than they usually choose to exercise.
All managers and recruiters know that “cultural fit” is a key to successful hiring.
That’s what the Bezos’s of the world, in their unfettered thirst for profit, don’t see. And it’s increasingly the way all organizations will have to operate.
I thought Carney did very well, presenting a balanced and well-argued response to the Times’ conclusions that were persuasive and that were certainly tested, but not rebutted, on Monday morning by CBS This Morning presenters including Charlie Rose and Gayle King. I encouraged them to talk with employees and learn about our environment. You love it or you don’t. I think this is where the “HR doesn’t care” perception comes from.
Markus Giesler, an associate professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, said Canadian companies are just as susceptible to the extremes of corporate culture as American ones. Work hours far greater than 40 is the norm. “And they are really rude”.
[Once] my mgr told me to skip my daughters bday party on a Sunday bcs work “should be your baby.”…My mgr was under so much pressure…someone spotted my mgr crying under desk later that month.
In psychology, there is a field of study called “attribution theory”, which looks at how we assign causality.
We found no significant increase in performance for those in the external-beneficiary condition. But when the reverse occurs – a project fails, we lose a job – we quickly blame factors outside ourselves. If employees are identified to be suffering from illness such as cancer, miscarriages or other chronic diseases, they would be fired as normal as anyone who doesn’t meet the company’s standards. Even more shocking – two of them are women.
Critics of the piece noted that its assertions were hard to square with large amounts of feedback data gathered from Amazon employees, who in the aggregate gave the company decent marks, and at worst considered it roughly comparable to the pace set by other big Silicon Valley firms.
Until now, none of that convinced Heritage to join in – “because the convenience of buying stuff in my trousers on a laptop on my sofa slightly outweighs my sense of moral discomfort, and also because parcels make me feel special”, he wrote. Every week, I find emails in my inbox describing similar events. That’s why, when you see proposals to raise the minimum wage in big cities across the country, opponents gleefully cheer on the rise of robots and automated processes to take the place of grocery clerks and fast-food employees.
Now the image of Amazon as a grueling place to work, and Bezos as an insensitive taskmaster, is harder to shake and will probably prove troublesome for some time. We spend our vacations on our laptops rather than on the beach.
What he meant, though, was that he could not guarantee that his intentions for the business would be accurately interpreted and carried out. Perhaps those who regard themselves as overachievers can actually be accomplishing more. Stories about customer mistreatment drove him absolutely nuts.
To be clear: The problems with white-collar worker treatment cited in Kantor and Streitfeld’s article are real (and Streitfeld, to his credit, has covered the poor conditions at Amazon warehouses as well).
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Commentary by Marie McIntyre, a career coach (www.yourofficecoach.com) and the author of “Secrets to Winning at Office Politics”. So kudos to you, Jeff.
