Over the past year, workers have filed at least 37 complaints to the National Labor Relations Board alleging interference with workers’ right to organize, more than triple the total in the previous year. (I’m still trying to unsee the photos of pee bottles that workers used in the absence of bathroom breaks that they submitted to Vice. And despite Bezos’ note that 94 percent of employees say they would recommend Amazon as a good place to work, it’s the company’s own workers who keep bringing disturbing information about their job sites to light. Marco Rubio to Democrats like President Biden and Sen. Pushback on the company’s claims of being a friend to the working man has come from all corners, from Republican Sen. Is it just me, or does this sound like a man who has at long last gotten the message? We have never failed when we set our minds to something, and we’re not going to fail at this either. On the details, we at Amazon are always flexible, but on matters of vision we are stubborn and relentless. I’m excited to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. It’s what I enjoy the most and what I do best. In my upcoming role as Executive Chair, I’m going to focus on new initiatives. The company should be “Earth’s Best Employer,” he writes, and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” And he plans to work on these projects personally: And so he sets two enormous goals for the Amazon of the future. When we survey fulfillment center employees, 94% say they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work.īezos knows that there will be more efforts to unionize in Amazon fulfillment centers, and future ones might not be quite so easy to defeat. They’re sophisticated and thoughtful people who have options for where to work. In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. If you read some of the news reports, you might think we have no care for employees. While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees – a vision for their success. I think we need to do a better job for our employees. Bezos writes:ĭoes your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t. Sure, Bezos has mentioned them before - his letter last year also devoted many paragraphs to Amazon’s support for the $15 minimum wage, re-training workers, and so on - but I’m not sure he has ever confronted critics quite so directly. His religious devotion to “ Day 1 ” - the idea that businesses ought to remain as paranoid and action-oriented as they were when they first born, lest they be defeated by entropy - precludes that sort of long walk into the sunset.Īnd so perhaps we should not be too surprised that he took on labor issues at the company head on. Certainly it would be warranted: Amazon is one of the most extraordinary businesses ever built.īut that’s not really Bezos’ style. Given Amazon’s tendency to dismiss most criticism, you might have expected Bezos’ last letter to shareholders to resemble an extended victory lap. (Amazon picked up 50 million new Prime subscribers in 2020, an increase of about one-third in just 12 months.) The company has seen record growth every year since anyway, and it was the most-liked of all big tech companies even before the pandemic made people more depend on it. A couple years before that, it conducted a sham search for a second “headquarters” that angered politicians around the country. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company had lied to lawmakers about whether it used data from third-party sellers to inform product development. Last month, it picked a losing fight with Congress over the unionization efforts at its Bessemer, AL fulfillment center. Today, let’s talk about the new tone Jeff Bezos is taking when talking about Amazon - and whether we can expect it to have any practical effect on the company after he turns over the CEO job to his successor, Andy Jassy.Ī recurring theme in this column is Amazon’s general indifference to public perception. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies before Congress over video chat last July.
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