Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
A reception desk at Amazon offices in downtown Seattle, Washington.
Glen Chapman | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon employees on Tuesday continued to sound off about CEO Andy Jassy’s recently announced return-to-office mandate, including spamming an internal website with messages conveying their opposition to the new policy.
A group of tech workers created a Slack channel and drafted an internal petition pushing back on the mandate, which requires them to be back in the office at least three days a week beginning May 1. The petition urges Jassy and Amazon’s leadership team, known as the S-team, to drop the mandate, just days after it was announced.
The group has since amassed 16,000 members, and about 5,000 employees have signed the petition as of Tuesday night.
Employee dissatisfaction with the mandate spilled over onto the e-retailer’s internal news feed for employees, called Inside Amazon, where workers repeatedly commented on a recording of Jassy’s recent all hands meeting.
“By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth’s best employer,” according to screenshots viewed by CNBC. “I believe this decision will be detrimental to our business and is antithetical to how we make decisions at Amazon.”
Employees began leaving those comments after Amazon disabled staffers from “liking” or commenting on Jassy’s memo announcing the return-to-office mandate, according to one employee, who asked to remain anonymous. Each comment shows the poster’s identity and role at the company.
Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for childcare, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office.
One worker said they’d recently leased a car that with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit.
Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute.
One employee invited Jassy to the Slack channel, which prompted staffers to encourage their colleagues to be responsible and avoid creating too much of a stir, as it could cause the company to shut down the channel.
Many staffers are putting the phrase “Remote Advocacy” in their Slack status in order to show their support for the petition.
In addition to conveying their concerns about the mandate, the petition also presents a number of data points and studies highlighting the benefits of remote work, such as improved productivity, and the ability to attract and retain top talent.
Previously, Amazon had left it up to individual managers to decide how often their teams would be required to come into the office. Jassy had also embraced remote and hybrid work, predicting it would have a lasting impact on how people do their jobs.
Last week, Jassy acknowledged that calling employees back to the office would come with some challenges.
“We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work,” Jassy wrote in a memo announcing the mandate.
Several tech companies have reverted back to in person work as the pandemic has eased. Google and Apple have required some of their employees to return to the office since last year, while Disney in January began requiring hybrid employees to be in the office four days a week.
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Technology
Amazon launches fixed pricing for treatment of conditions such as hair loss. Hims & Hers stock drops 15%
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
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