Seattle-based Amazon employees plan to leave their jobs on May 31 in retaliation for layoffs and orders to return to work.
No less than 1,000 employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters will participate within the strike, which was announced via Slack and emails which were reviewed by the Washington Post.
“We’re really coming out to show that leadership is taking us within the incorrect direction and that employees need to have a say in decisions that affect our lives,” one Seattle-based Amazon software engineer anonymously told the Seattle Times.
“It’s a one-day strike to show strength,” the employee said.
Employees dissatisfied with Amazon’s return to office mandate that went into effect May 1, in addition to members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, are participating in a strike, the Times reported.
No less than 1,000 employees are expected to leave work at lunchtime and gather outside the Spheres at Amazon’s South Lake Union campus in Seattle.
Employees at Amazon campuses elsewhere within the US are also participating, planning to sign off for the day after their lunch break.
According to the Times, Amazon employees for climate justice cited “failures on the carbon front” and “green laundry” as the explanation why its members left their jobs on May 31.
Greenwashing is a type of promoting where corporations make broad sustainability claims about products to get consumers to buy them without sufficient evidence.
It is not clear what specific products Amazon’s climate justice employees consider “green.”
An Amazon spokesperson told the Times in response to the strike: “We respect the rights of our employees to express their opinions.”
This is not the primary time Amazon employees have opposed the retail giant’s return to work plan because it went into effect almost a month ago.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has announced plans to introduce a mandatory hybrid work schedule in February.
In it, he ordered corporate employees to report to the office at the least three days a week. Previously, team leaders could call to learn how often their teams were working remotely.
The change was immediately met with a response from employees who said they were more productive and enjoyed a higher work-life balance in a distant working environment.
In March, some 30,000 employees even went to this point as to sign a petition calling for Jassy to phase out the hybrid work schedule.
The petitioners advocated “distance advocacy” and said that spending mandatory days working in an office goes against Amazon’s stance on reasonably priced housing, diversity and climate change.
Jassy stepped back, saying that going back to the office would construct effective cooperation.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s head of HR, then said the return to office plan would go ahead as planned.
“Given the massive variety of our employees and the big selection of our businesses and customers, we recognize that this shift may take a while, but we are confident that it can have long-term advantages in enhancing our ability to deliver products to our customers, strengthening our culture and a growing and developing workforce,” Galetti said in a company-wide memo.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The strike follows a year-long cost-cutting effort at Amazon, including the shedding of 105,000 Whole Foods employees in late April and the shedding of one other 9,000 employees a month earlier – a total of 27,000 layoffs since November.
The layoffs in March included Amazon Web Services, People and Technology (PXT), Promoting, and Twitch’s live video division.
Amazon also halted construction on its second Virginia headquarters at PenPlace, despite the fact that it already had 8,000 employees reporting to the office.
As an alternative, latest employees will report to the Met Park campus, the primary phase of the event, due to open in June.
John Schoettler, Amazon’s head of real estate, said in a statement that “Met Park may have space to house greater than 14,000 employees.”
Amazon saw no growth in online retail sales in the primary quarter, although revenue for the January-March quarter was $127.4 billion, up 9% from the $116.4 billion earned in the identical period last yr.