Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don’t comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show::Amazon has updated its promotions policy to enforce its office attendance policy.
Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don’t comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show::Amazon has updated its promotions policy to enforce its office attendance policy.
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.
If you employ someone for a remote position you don’t get to fire them for being in a remote position
They can, though the employees would be able to claim unemployment if the job was remote and then changed to on-site but if the job was on-site with a temporary remote policy the employee wouldn’t have a leg to stand on there and could be dismissed for cause.
In the US, what you can and cannot fire someone for is complicated and counter intuitive.
A low performer that is part of a protected class is hard to fire because you need to have copious documentation that they were dismissed due to poor performance and were not targeted for their protected class status. This is a good thing and prevents unscrupulous bosses from firing a woman for getting pregnant, targeting people of a particular race, religion, or gender, or any number of other awful things. Those things will only come up if the former employee sues, and many will not, so some bad bosses or companies get away with this while others end up in court because someone that needed to be fired is crying discrimination.
On the flip side, if it falls outside of those protected classes, you can fire someone for any other reason or no reason at all. “I woke up in a bad mood and picked a name out of a hat to fire” is legal. You may get a fight if the person you picked claims discrimination on one of the protected classes and you have to explain to a judge that you’re actually just a bad human and not discriminating, but it’s allowed.
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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.
It depends what’s in their contract. I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing based on zero experience of working in Amazon and am using my knowledge of European employment as a baseline. Of course, your mileage may vary in the US?
In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.
The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.