Last Saturday an article on the New York Times blasts Amazon because of its working conditions in the company. Entitled "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" it exposed how the company pressured their employees with their “unreasonably high” standards. The report detailed the company's lack of empathy for employees' health-related issues. There were instances when employees that suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover. A woman employee who suffers with breast cancer was placed on "performance improvement plan" because personal issues were affecting her work.
And because of the backbreaking work and Amazon's penchant of extracting unreasonable work from their employees Amazon has expanded tremendously their campus is now a 10-million-square-foot with thousands of new workers. Amazon has also eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the US at $250 billion and their CEO Jeff Bezos is the 5th wealthiest person in the world.
Bezos responded with a memo to Amazon employees defending the culture at the company and encouraging employees who heard of similar stories to contact him as well as human resources.
He said, "Even if it's rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero," "The people we hire here are the best of the best. You are recruited every day by other world-class companies, and you can work anywhere you want."
Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, an Amazon analyst with Forrester Research said that "most of the allegations sound consistent with things that former employees have told me about the company."
- Work work work work, corporations greedy goal to accumulate more money and wealth are turning people into stupid zombies with no life. We are not robots mr CEO.
