What sucks about stories like this is, while my heart breaks for what this guy went through, managers don't have the same luxury of defending their side of the story to Mother Jones. I worked as an EM at Amazon. I went into this ready to think he had a bad boss (because those definitely exist at Amazon), but after reading this I feel like there's another side to this that has more compassion than is being reflected h…
> He was at turns informally warned, encouraged to take leave, and offered severance. Both these options would leave him without ongoing income and would do nothing to help him as a person[1]. They'd neatly solve the employer's problems though, and it's apparent who you more closely identify with in this story. 1. As someone else mentioned, short- and/or long-term disability was the mutually beneficial solution, but…
If your work capabilities continually suffer, short of legally protected events, at some point your company will make moves to end the employment if you are no longer able to provide value for your compensation. Doesn’t matter if Amazon or a mom and pop shop. At some point there is an end to patience in every organization. In a company with 1.3M employees…it will be unlikely that his situation was all that unique among the employees. With that many employees there could easily be a thousand or more employees dealing with a similar family illness issue, and with similar inabilities to take unpaid LOAs. So a consistency of the policies governing this type of thing will always trump special single considerations in a corporation.
As long as Amazon consistently applied it’s policies it’s simply not at fault, and I would argue handled this situation as morally as a corporation could. Amazon is not at fault for the illness, nor at fault for the employee’s inability to take an unpaid leave. If they provided the opportunity for the employee to take an unpaid LOA and preserve his $300k job…that is a helluva benefit to that employee in my mind.