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Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

seattletimes.com

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Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#261

Post by fzeroracer »

acheron wrote: post #247
fzeroracer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically me; I keep a decent chunk in savings in case of emergency / downturn and then the rest in stocks / retirement etc. I hate having to invest in the stock market because most of it is gambling and speculation, but at least I can dump it in an index fund and it'll be fairly safe. There's a reason why a significant number of millennials and below are cheering on for a housing bust and it's because it's po…

My parents just sold their fairly nice large house for something like $170k. Of course it's not in a cool city. Living in a high cost of living area with expensive houses is voluntary consumption. If that's what you voluntarily want to spend your money on then fine, but you get just as much sympathy as the people complaining about how expensive brand new BMWs are.

How exactly is it voluntary between the high CoL cities having the major career opportunities and companies continuing to force people back in office? It's funny that you would even say like that in a thread where people are protesting having to return to the office for that reason.

I lived in Texas for four years. A house in the ass end of nowhere costs $150k-200k. It also comes with a two hour commute to get to my then-office, has literally nothing nearby and I would've been on my own during the next major freeze event.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#262

Post by RestlessMind »

helij wrote: post #255
eastbound wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer, I needed to meet people for my growth in the start of my career, and I needed to meet people for character development. Old farts complain that younglings are not socially/emotionally independent and apt to talk to their computer all day, but that’s also a recipe for suicide.

Counterpoint: I didn't need any of that.

Counter-study to your counterpoint (better than sharing random anecdotes): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03044...

From the abstract: Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#264

Post by smsm42 »

runarberg wrote: post #256
smsm42 wrote: post #219

> to show their frustration with recent layoffs, return-to-office mandates and a lack of action to address the company’s impact on climate change Now one only has to add social justice, marriage equality, immigration policy and saving the whales, and the mission of making it impossible to understand what it is about will be accomplished. Dudes, it's OK to be upset by just RTO, you don't have to bring the whole list e…

Modern labor struggle is social justice. Just see the most successful labor leader in recent years, Christian Smalls, see how he talks, and what he emphasizes. See also various union statements by Starbucks worker’s unions. Climate change, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, #metoo, those are all integral to a modern union. And raising those among your labor concerns has proven to be effective in building up the sol…

I guess whatever works, works - but I wonder how many union members actually support that and how many just go along because of the benefits and because there's no choice. I understand the original idea of unions, as means for improving worker's conditions, but this is not that. That's just generic leftist activism masquerading as worker's movement, and prioritizing things that have little to do with workers' benefit. Maybe that's why the unions are in decline now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...

Maybe if they were more about the workers and less about the wokers, they had more willing members.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#265

Post by hintymad »

sleepybrett wrote: post #47
idlewords wrote: post #13

The danger of any walkout is that you won't be allowed to walk back in. The time for useful collective action was back when tech companies couldn't hire fast enough, and tech employees enjoyed unusual leverage. After 27,000 layoffs, a performative walkout without a defined goal is just making it easier for Amazon management as they plan the next round of cuts.

If the number is a large enough percentage they couldn't do a lockout. While it may be an industry-wide supply side problem for employees you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff and hire new people and expect things to just keep on truckin', losing that much institutional knowledge would be suicide.

> you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff

Define huge? Tech companies increased their headcount between 2020 and 2022 by at least double-digit percentage, Amazon included. I'm not sure how many of them are essential in top management's eyes.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#266

Post by x86x87 »

hw wrote: post #140
crop_rotation wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, so return to office will cause top performers to leave. The incompetent people are not going anywhere due to such policies.

I know lots of top performers who enjoy being back in the office, and low performers who would prefer WFH so they can coast under the radar

Lol. Lots! All of the top performers.

Because sitting in traffic pissing your life and time away is #worthit.

Because being able to eat a healthy lunch you make youself is lame.

Because going to the office to attend virtual meetings on Chime is the best.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#267

Post by x86x87 »

worrycue wrote: post #221
hw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not like they won’t leave if they manage to get remote job elsewhere. Even without RTO, people will still leave for other jobs if the grass is greener on the other side. If anything, WFH makes it easier for someone to go job hunting and do interviews. If the environment is your downside to RTO - you’re reaching. The loss in productivity when someone does 2 hours in traffic a day is probably a more compelling a…

For most people the waste of time, energy, and money commuting is what they will care about but you can’t deny the environmental impact of millions of people commuting.

Climate Pledge, amiright? /s

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#268

Post by bmcfeeley »

xtracto wrote: post #246
true_religion wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point. This happened to me once. The team was in NYC, and I wasn’t so I was coming to the office uselessly. I do like coming into the office since it’s easier to turn onto and way from work with travel as a context switch but that aspect made it worthless for anything else.

So people who want to work in the office are entitled to keep their coworkers who dont want to be stuck there?

This is an extraordinary and disingenuous leap, and it doesn't even merit responding to as a proxy for your willingness to engage with others, but to make the superficially obvious point more crystal clear: the existence of folks who prefer the communal and social aspects of work in a common location is not up for debate, and no, their preference on this subject does not imply that they uniformly think everyone should share their preference.

Please take a deep breath and consider the extent to which your unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of people who don't share your opinion may harm, rather than help, your cause.

Re: Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs

#269

Post by revlolz »

dbish wrote: post #176
revlolz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a multitude of things. The LPs are the start of it, but the data oriented culture has been ignored by rto mandate and the head of HR's apathetic response to the remote advocates. Amazon is a very heavy document writing company and more often than not if you had to write a doc you faced someone saying "so what?" and then that person or their/your leaders requiring proving points and writing narratives leveraging…

As an ex-amazonian myself I agree with the first part about data driven and writing culture and that much of the way this is presented is very non-amazonian, but I'm not getting how rto is a "cookie cutter" example of day 2 behavior. Given that many startups are pushing for in person recently (at least publically, I'm not weighing in either way), how is going in person clearly something that means amazon is past the…

How leadership has handled rto is more what makes it the peak example. The bureaucracy, the company's stagnation, the crippling slow response to a modern market and digging their head into the sand. Rto is the peak example because it has exposed how when it matters the executives (L10+) abandon LPs, refuse factual discussion, and are choosing paths that aren't good for customers or employees. It's exposed all of their current efforts for employee connection is a farce and pointless. It contradicts Amazon's core company culture that employees are "leaders" and shows how delusional these people are as they have started calling employees who don't want to rto "selfish."
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