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Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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That's the idea. It's illegal for Amazon to fire people for not wanting to return on-site, so they do the legally allowed minimum to condition promotions based on that. Legal, but still shitty. They hired a ton of remote (by contract) workers during the pandemic and made a shit ton of profit, now they don't know how to get rid of them without a severance package.
Employment laws are state-by-state, but I don't know a single one where it's illegal to fire someone for not coming into the office.
I've been in and out of these types of contracts for the last 20 years. If a position is remote then it is marked as remote in the contract. Even with the United States' horrible worker protection laws, they still can't unilaterally change a contract.
This is true for contract workers, but I believe we're talking about W2 employees, who rarely have a contract if they're not part of a union.
My perspective might be skewed because I always have a contract, even when I am an internal FTE. But my circumstance is not necessarily 'normal' since I live in Canada but work in the US/EU far more often than at home.
The laws are pretty different for contract workers vs W2 employees. W2 employees can have contracts, but it's really rare outside of unions. Conditions of employment can in most cases be changed at the employers discretion.
I feel a little bit like I'm defending Amazon here, but I'm really trying to highlight that our worker protections are crap in the US. Unions are really the way to go if employees want security. Tech industry has way too few unions.