Amazon is a lousy company to work for

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/08/15/the-real-deathstar/?utm_content=Amazon%20may%20well%20be%20the%20most%20evil%20company%20in%20technology%20and%20Jeff%20Bezos%20should%20be%20ashamed&awesm=tnw.to_j4wMV&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=share%20button

by Mic Wright
Aug. 15, 2015

You are dying of cancer. You have just lost your unborn child. You have to care for your dying father. You are worthless. You are unproductive. Your colleagues hate you. They have reported you. You deserve to be fired.

Welcome to the Amazon way.

We have known for years that Amazon is a brutally Darwinian workplace. Anyone who has read ‘The Everything Store’ knows that. But in a newly-published New York Times (NYT) article, the almost unvarnished reality of its working conditions is sketched out in punishing detail.

Re: The NYTimes piece on Amazon's workplace issues: isn't that American employment in general? I'm astounded by how US co's treat staff.

— Matt Brian (@m4tt) August 15, 2015

All of those examples I used in the first paragraph are real. They are all things that have happened to Amazon employees. Here are some relevant paragraphs from the NYT piece:

[A member of the Kindle team] began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.

…a woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

…a woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired”

……a former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

Later in the piece, the NYT ponders the question of why Amazon has no female managers in its most senior leadership team. Is it that hard to see why? It appears quite clear that having a child or providing care to a family member is not and will not be valued.

On the basis of the management philosophy outlined in this article and many – though less brutal – examinations of Jeff Bezos’ vision for the company he founded, I don’t believe we should look at Amazon as a corporation at all. It is a cult that sells things. You either give up your life to it or are crushed by it.

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