“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” said one former Amazon employee in a recent New York Times exposé about the brutal working conditions at the giant retailer. It seems a lot of workers had plenty of reason to spill tears.
One employee cited how, after years of receiving high performance ratings, her boss told her she was “a problem” when she cut back working nights and weekends to care for her dying father. “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
Another woman explained that she got a low performance appraisal because she had to miss work to receive treatment for thyroid cancer. Yet another employee left for a business trip the day after she miscarried twins, claiming that her manager told her that “work is still going to need to get done.” But wait. There’s more. A worker with breast cancer was put on a performance-improvement plan (PIP) because “difficulties” in her “personal life” got in the way of work.
That the article’s most barbaric anecdotes involve women is probably no coincidence (though the piece does cite numerous male workers driven to despair). There’s no question that a workplace that seemingly operates like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory inherently punishes women disproportionately. Perhaps if Amazon had more than 20 out of 110 women in its executive and senior ranks, the organization would be more hospitable to everyone. Maybe if more than 25 percent of its professional ranks had women, attitudes within the company might not be stuck in the Industrial Age.
Then again, is the lack of estrogen the cause or the result of Seattle’s greatest tyranny?
The answer is yes. But hey, as one employee says in the story, “Conflict brings innovation.” True, but there’s a difference between disagreeing about how to market diapers and punishing an employee for trying to have a life outside of work.
And yet the reason that this story is a story is because Amazon leads as the world’s largest retailer, having recently snatched the title from Walmart. So the thinking goes that the company owes its success to its apparently totalitarian work environment.
The reality is that that may actually be true. It’s certainly possible that mistaking employees for slaves can lead to great profits. If cruelty works for Amazon, then it’s obviously a best practice, right?
Not exactly. You can find plenty of top companies that value their people as…people. And even if putting an employee on a PIP for coming down with a disease were a best practice—and for the record, I don’t believe in the concept of best practices to begin with—you’ve got to ask: At what cost?
Many Amazonians did, in fact, ask. And they answered by leaving the enterprise. To be fair, CEO Jeff Bezos issued a rebuttal to the story, in which he claimed not to recognize “a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard,” adding, “I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market.”
