Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work From Home (yahoo.com) 38
"Amazon is making it harder for disabled employees to get permission to work from home," reports Bloomberg, a move they say shows Amazon's "determination" to enforce a five-days-a-week return to the office.
The company recently told employees with disabilities that it was implementing a more rigorous vetting process, both for new requests to work from home and applications to extend existing arrangements. Affected workers must submit to a "multilevel leader review" and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs... Affected employees are receiving calls from "accommodation consultants" who explain how the new policy works. They review medical documentation and discuss how effective working from home has been for employees who've already received an accommodation as well as any previous attempts to help the person work in the office. If the consultant agrees that the person should be allowed to work from home, another Amazon manager must sign off. If they don't, the request goes to a third manager...
Some workers fear the process was designed to make requests less likely to be approved, two employees said. In internal chat rooms, according to one of them, employees have accused [Chief Executive Officer Andy] Jassy of hypocrisy because the bureaucratic process belies his stated determination to cut through red tape that he says is slowing Amazon down.
"Jassy says the return-to-office requirement will strengthen the company's culture, which he believes has suffered since the pandemic and become overly bureaucratic," the article points out. But it adds that down at the workforce level, the move "is seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce."
Some workers fear the process was designed to make requests less likely to be approved, two employees said. In internal chat rooms, according to one of them, employees have accused [Chief Executive Officer Andy] Jassy of hypocrisy because the bureaucratic process belies his stated determination to cut through red tape that he says is slowing Amazon down.
"Jassy says the return-to-office requirement will strengthen the company's culture, which he believes has suffered since the pandemic and become overly bureaucratic," the article points out. But it adds that down at the workforce level, the move "is seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce."
Company Culture (Score:5, Insightful)
Culture is something bacteria have.
All a company should care about is whether the work gets done. Does it? Fine, stop micromanaging until it doesn't.
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The culture is that morale is bad. Even bad culture is a culture.
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All a company should care about is whether the work gets done.
You can't tell if the work gets done unless you measure it.
And there's nothing here to indicate that measuring whether or not the work gets done is, in fact, the goal of this initiative.
(Though with Amazon, anything they do is automatically suspect.)
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If your company digs ditched of provided dimensions, sure. If the work is easily packaged into atomic units, executable by individuals with few dependencies, the more I agree with you.
But when the work depends on teams, culture starts to matter.
You want mundane, average, repeatable results without improving? Ditch culture and focus on ruthless efficiency and the maintenance of people as replaceable cogs in the machine. Like Amazon drivers. And we know how great that is.
I'm not suggesting Amazon will improve
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Fine, stop micromanaging until it doesn't.
This isn't micomanaging. In fact some would argue that emphasising attendance over performance isn't actually management at all. If they were micromanaging employees they wouldn't need them to be in the office.
Wild idea (Score:1, Troll)
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You get paid for being at work (rather than doing stuff)? Are you a security guard or just in one of those really good mob-affiliated unions?
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
We're gonna fight this work-from-office stuff from every possible angle huh? How the heck did people do work before the Internet? If you don't want to work in the manner your boss tells you, then fucking quit! You can't demand to be paid while simultaneously dictating what your job should entail. Why would someone pay you to do something they don't want you to do? That doesn't seem fair. does it?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't demand to be paid while simultaneously dictating what your job should entail.
Actually, you can. It's called "negotiation," and it happens all the time. There is nothing legally, morally, nor professionally wrong with insisting on what you want and seeing how your negotiation partner responds. It is a very common, human, behavior to say "this point is non-negotiable" when actually, it is very negotiable, and keeping that point on the table is how you win it.
Of course, it may very well turn out to be truly non-negotiable, at which point you determine whether or not the point is equally non-negotiable for you. If it is non-negotiable for both of you, then it makes sense to quit.
But the "up and quit" is the last resort. It should take place after negotiation has failed.
This is how the most powerful, and the most professional, people in the world manage their differences. It is absolutely how ordinary employees should do the same.
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Educated negotiators understand the concept of the BATNA: Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement.
Or, more simply, the back-up plan.
Anyone who is going to insist on work from home should have a BATNA lined-up. That would be an alternative job or an eye on a good place to live where there are many workable options. With that in hand, there would be no reason to cry if negotiations fell apart. Just move on.
And anyway, there's really nothing wrong with crying on reddit. It's kinda what the site is for. O
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing was said when people stopped doing 7 day 12 hour factory shifts.
Change doesn’t happen without pushback from the ruling class. If you like wasting time and gasoline in your daily commute then good for you. The internet is here to stay and if the work is completed on time who the hell cares what physical chair my ass is occupying?
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This attitude is what caused your neighbors to vote for us to be ruled by a billionaire cartel. Going too far left caused a far right shift that we may not recover from.
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Re: Wow (Score:2)
Way to be sensitive of the disabled. Maybe you could also suggest they jump off a bridge after they âoefuckingâ quit their jobs.
Re: Wow (Score:3)
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And the reverse is you think an employee owns the employer. The difference is that the employee can quite whereas you put the employer in a no-win situation where they keep have to paying the extortion fee.
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We're gonna fight this work-from-office stuff from every possible angle huh? How the heck did people do work before the Internet? If you don't want to work in the manner your boss tells you, then fucking quit! You can't demand to be paid while simultaneously dictating what your job should entail. Why would someone pay you to do something they don't want you to do? That doesn't seem fair. does it?
All a matter of perspective, I guess. Jeez, such an easy way to accommodate someone, and you still won't do it?
Why would the manager need to sign off? (Score:2)
The entire point of getting an accomodation (aside from the obvious) is so a third party is making the decision, not the manager. If the manager has to sign off on the accomodation request, what's the point?
Also, I'm fairly certain there are a few federal laws about this which take precedence over any company policy, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act [ada.gov].
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But how will a parking space fix my crippling social anxiety disorder? The only thing that seems to help is my therapeutic visits to Starbucks.
Quit and become a barista, problem solved. :-)
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Well, okay... but you're gonna have to install the drive-thru yourself.
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Also, the requirement is to provide (sometimes subjectively) reasonable accommodations based on actual need, not want. Pretty sure that simply wanting to work from home doesn't fall under the accommodation requirements of the ADA. Outside that, and other legal limits, employers are free to set any conditions for employment they want, including having to work in the office. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
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What about the person with an alcohol and nicotine problem who can't be more than a minute away from a functional coffee pot and who has massive uncontrollable diarrhea requiring them to work using a laptop while sitting on the toilet with a flask, thermos, and pack of Marlboro Reds? And don't forget the meatball sub. Just make sure you flush before igniting an open flame to light the smokes. The bathroom exhaust fan would be a must.
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The Americans with Disabilities Act requires a company to provide reasonable accommodations.
Not . . . really. It requires a company to engage in an interactive process to determine if an accommodation that is reasonable to both sides is possible, while ensuring the employee can perform the core functions of the job. The italic part is important.
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If Amazon isn't willing to give reasonable accommodation to people with actual disabilities, they will get sued. That, and a torrent of "shame on Amazon" articles.
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That, and a torrent of "shame on Amazon" articles.
Which would be just another day that ends in 'y'.
Bureaucracy (Score:2)
Jassy says the return-to-office requirement will strengthen the company's culture, which he believes has suffered since the pandemic and become overly bureaucratic
So too much bureaucracy is the result of employees working from home. It has nothing at all to do with Amazon enjoying a near monopoly in their line of business for decades with nearly impossible barriers to entry for any potential competitors?
Amazon's company culture (Score:4, Insightful)
Many engineers certainly like feeling like they are not another cog in the wheel of the corporate machine. They like feeling like they have purpose and are doing something important.
You can't fix corporate culture with RTO because work from home wasn't the problem. It's the corporate grind that is the problem. You can pay people increasingly ridiculous sums to pretend like it's not the problem, but in reality you're asking them to sell a piece of their soul.
I'm sorry the handicap has suffered as a result of this foolish solution to corporate culture.
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You can pay people increasingly ridiculous sums to pretend like it's not the problem, but in reality you're asking them to sell a piece of their soul.
For many, the only issue there is the price tag.
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You can pay people increasingly ridiculous sums to pretend like it's not the problem, but in reality you're asking them to sell a piece of their soul.
For many, the only issue there is the price tag.
They say the same thing about the worlds oldest profession too.
If your goal is working at Amazon (Score:3)
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That's a very narrow minded take. Amazon has 1.6 million employees doing everything from putting shit in boxes to advanced AI research. Those figures for employee retention and poor working conditions are typically reflected in a subset of the many areas they employ people in. Specifically the story of poor employee retention and high turnover in the industry was specifically related to logistics. Policies of deception were also largely targeted for union busting purposes.
Amazon is a big place and while I c
Play stupid games . . win stupid prizes (Score:2)
Easy fix for this if you have an existing job accommodation.
File a complaint with the EEOC. Your company will have to explain to them why your existing accommodation has all of
a sudden become such a burden on the company that they felt the need to revoke it. Assuming your existing accommodation
is a valid one, your company will likely let it go vs getting put into the spotlight of a government agency.
Companies really don't like the government getting involved in their day to day business and if they want to