Leaked messages show Amazon will force a ‘voluntary resignation’ on employees failing to relocate near their team ‘hubs’::undefined
Leaked messages show Amazon will force a ‘voluntary resignation’ on employees failing to relocate near their team ‘hubs’::undefined
Sounds like the solution is to say, “Yes,” then never show up onsite. Make them fire you, so you’re entitled to unemployment benefits and any severance.
No. The solution is to call their bullshitnout.
A company can’t hire you to work from one location (regardless if it’s WFH or not,) and then unilaterally decide to have you relocate.
“You can apply internally” or anything else that is a new contract doesn’t matter. They’re changing the terms of employment, and they can’t do that unilaterally.
The choices are to agree with their new terms, accept the “out” of taking another position in your area, or reject them. They can use what ever semantics they want, but it’s still a layoff.
In the
useUS, with at-will employment, they absolutely can. Terminating someone for not relocating is absolutely legal. And, barring contract or law to the contrary, severance is not required.This state of things are what happens when you remove unions from the workforce, and why companies like Amazon absolutely flip their shit when union talk starts.
Well, yes. But then they trigger unemployment. The can’t here is that they’re trying to avoid that.
In the us, you have to pay unemployment if they’re not terminated for cause. And refusing to locate is not an “acceptable” cause, so it comes to be an at-will termination (ie “we’re firing you because we can.”)
Also, the jobs they’re talking about usually come with severance packages. It’s not the warehouse gig workers
This is true.
Qualifying for Unemployment Insurance benefits is a decision made by the State, not the employer, and the standard for qualification is much lower than the one used to determine if terminating an employee is legal or not. That is, there are many things that will get you UI benefits that are still perfectly legal reasons to fire someone, as you said.
As an aside, UI is an insurance product sold (forcibly, by the State) to the employer. The employer pays a premium which rises or falls based on the number and cost of claims that employer generates. Naturally, employers are incentivized to reduce the number of claims to keep costs low, but it’s not, as is commonly thought, the employer paying benefits directly.
As another side, a strategy companies are using lately to keep their UI costs low is providing a severance package that pays all or part of the employee’s salary but paying it out over time. Depending on the state and the rules for that state’s UI program, that often counts against any UI benefit the former employee would receive, reducing the weekly benefit (sometimes to $0). It’s a thing I’ve only seen in the past 5 or so years. I would expect States to start to recognize this end-run around the system and adjust the rules accordingly in the near future.
this is an old strategy. It’s called “severance.” Many company will offer a severance package before going to lay offs that enhance retirement packages (especially for people close enough to it anyhow) or otherwise entice people to take it, instead.
It would really, really, suck if you had to rely on a former employer to pay unemployment. Just saying.
Did you not see the end of their post?
Yes. “Layoff” has a very specific meaning in employment. In the US, it is, in one form or another, ending the employment agreement because there is no longer available work. I.e., “Your position has been eliminated.”
That’s not the case in the “Everyone has to relocate to (place)” situation. It is not a layoff if you fail to comply. It is the company terminating your employment because you refuse to perform the job they want you to do.
I feel like everyone understands that the question of “have you been fired” shouldn’t include instances of “I refused to relocate” though.
It’s a constructive dismissal where I live, unless your employment contract specifies you must work in the office. If it doesn’t and you applied for and accepted a remote job, then you’re pretty much golden.
I’m not in USA though FWIW.
IIRC it is where I live (in the US) as well.
You know how a lot of job applications say something like “Have you ever been fired?”. That is a pretty strong filter. When you are expecting hundreds, if not thousands, of applications from everyone who knows how to look at linkedin, you need to set those filters up. And it becomes a roll of the dice as to whether “worked at a FAANG” gets you auto interviewed or “been fired” gets you auto rejected. And, if you are not currently working for them, employment verification is not too uncommon. Everyone saw the blog posts about how to lie on your CV. So if there is no risk of “Fred will get fired if we ask Amazon if he works there” then HR will ask… and get an earful.
So it stands to reason that most staff are more likely to just resign and lose their severance rather than take the termination.
Constructive dismissal isn’t the same thing as being fired for cause, regardless of whether Amazon tries to lie about it.
And I am sure Amazon will make that distinction when they get called about the person who actively spited them and forced a firing/termination when they were otherwise going to get to skip out on unemployment and severance.
But hey, you can sue. That worked out real well for the ex-twitter employees… and even people amazon dicked over in the past.
Like a lot of things in life: it doesn’t actually matter who is morally or legally in the right. What matters is what the bad actors can get away with.
If you get to the interview stage and say “look, you should know that I was part of the team that were fired as part of this news article” then you are basically set. Any company worth working for will say “Jesus christ, that is fucked”. But if HR calls amazon to make sure you aren’t some kid who was lying on linkedin? You are now not just a bad potential employee, you are a liar. And that is the kind of thing that can potentially even come up in conversations with colleagues.
I think you’re really blowing this out of proportion as if this is the scary “permanent record” teachers used to warn you about in elementary school.
Explaining that they needed you to relocate and you weren’t willing is a satisfactoy answer. Additionally there’s no requirement that you put Amazon on your resume if it did come down to that. Frankly I don’t think the new employer would really care what happened between you and some other corporation if you seem competent and they aren’t going to check every reference on every single person that applies to a corporation with 100k+ employees to stop you from getting an interview first.
It is less a “permanent record” and more just the reality of a global workplace. Once you hit the “amazon” level of employment, you are applying for the kinds of positions where people will move across the country for that paycheck. You are looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants.
And the reality of it is: When you have that many applications, you aren’t going to interview every one of them. Hell, you probably aren’t going to read every one of them. You are going to apply basic filters. Asked for a cover letter? You’ll probably ignore that chatgpt generated mess, but you better see that a PDF was uploaded. Otherwise you just avoided an interview. Same for red flags in the application process.
I’ve been on a lot of hiring committees over the years. At bigger companies? I only ever see the filtered applicants. So you would have never had the chance to even explain what happened. And at the smaller companies? I know I try to “be one of the good ones” and will do a quick google as to why you might have left at a given time and so forth. But I’ve also punted a few that looked “too good to be true” to the poor bastard we have handling HR for a startup.
As for “just don’t list Amazon”: Sure. If you have a ridiculously amazing CV then you can skip a FAANG company. Otherwise, you want to list that shit because that is going to open more doors for you than just about anything imaginable. And that is also the kind of work history where people are going to check to see if your linkedin is legit and maybe call Amazon to find out if you are lying.
Small company or even a bankrupt company? Too much effort. But one of the biggest companies on the planet that is known for hiring some of the best of the best of multiple engineering disciplines? That is the scenario where you ask Joe in HR to make a call or two.
Like I said before: Amazon/FAANG (or whatever we call it these days)? That pretty much guarantees you get an interview. Report that you were fired? That pretty much guarantees we don’t bother with you because we don’t have to care about whether you were fired for good reasons or bad reasons. And if we find out you lied about the latter while we are checking the former?
At this point every hiring manager out there is aware of Amazon’s terrible workplace practices. Put on the resume don’t say you got fired. When you get asked why you left, tell the truth of the situation. Some managers won’t want you because if it sure, but the intelligent ones can see the tree through the forest and those are the places you want to work anyway.
It’s sub optimal but that’s what happens when you join a place like Amazon.
Have you ever been fired?
Lie. They lie to you, you lie to them. They’re not the government. The worst they can do is fire you if they ever found out, which they won’t.
That’s job abandonment and would disqualify from unemployment benefits.