A month later Amazon ordered its own employees to return to the office, some of them have walked out again. Meetings took place today outside the company’s headquarters in Seattle and Amazon offices in a few other cities. The employees are protesting Amazon’s return mandate and the lack of meaningful progress on the climate pledge.
“Morale is the lowest I’ve seen since working here,” says a Seattle worker who started in 2020 and survived two rounds of layoffs this year that left 27,000 Amazonians out of work. “People have lost faith in leadership because they made these unilateral decisions that affect employees’ lives.”
Walkout organizers say more than 1,000 workers joined the rally in Seattle with demonstrations in other cities, bringing the total participation to more than 2,000. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser says Amazon estimates about 300 people attended the demonstration in Seattle. The company currently employs approximately 350,000 business and technical employees worldwide and approximately 65,000 in the Seattle area.
While there has been a wave of protests and strikes by Amazon’s warehouse workers in recent years, today is the largest demonstration by company workers since a 2019 climate protest that saw thousands of workers walk off their jobs. It comes with tech workers across the industry still reeling from an unprecedented number of layoffs as companies cut back after pandemic hiring.
In February, Andy Jassy, who took over as CEO from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, became the latest tech boss to announce that his employees would have to return to the office and instructed staff to show up in person three days a week starting May 1. On the day of that announcement, employees formed a Slack channel to rally support for remote work and sent a petition signed by 20,000 employees to Amazon’s leadership asking them to reconsider the mandate. Employees say the policy reversed an earlier promise that remote work decisions would be left to individual teams, adding that some employees had moved as a result. Amazon’s bosses rejected the request.
That defeat compounded a broader malaise that was also fueled by Amazon’s massive layoffs and the company’s rising emissions, despite pledging to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040. a reason to talk to Amazon about their complaints,” says a Los Angeles employee who walks out of his office today. “In doing this, we realized there were a lot of similarities and an overarching theme from Amazon that takes us back in a lot of big ways.”
“We always listen and will continue to do so, but we are happy with how the first month has been with more people in the office,” writes Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson. “There’s more energy, collaboration and connections, and we’ve heard this from many employees and the businesses around our offices.”
The past year has seen remote working become a flashpoint for many tech workers who have come to enjoy the flexibility it offered during the pandemic and, in some cases, reorganized their lives around the freedom of living away from tech hubs.
