30 Aug Disagree but c’mon back anyway
“Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s brutal message to remote workers refusing to come back to the office: ‘It’s probably not going to work out for you’”
–https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-brutal-110229474.html
Wow. It’s probably not gonna work out for you. Carrot, meet stick.
I mean . . . what did you expect? The triumph of John & Jane Q. Public over the giant corporate crony capitalist beast? 😆 As Scrooge said, “I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
“Earlier this year, Kelly decided to leave New York City to care for a sick relative. She figured she could move away while continuing to work remotely as a software engineer for Bloomberg, just as she’d done for the previous two years. But Kelly’s decision introduced her to the sharp end of office life in 2023, as companies try to persuade their employees to come back to the office. Her plans to move clashed with Bloomberg’s return-to-the-office directive. In the end, Kelly, who asked to go by a pseudonym because of her company’s confidentiality policy, lost her job.” –https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-came-return-office-policies-100000996.html emphasis mine
🔮 Prediction alert: we’re segueing from the carrot to the stick.
–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/04/05/a-job-i-dont-love/ written on April 4, published on April 5, 2023. Perhaps the fastest vindication I’ve ever had.
I return again to Jed Hill’s comment in Malice: This is the present. This is the here and the now.
–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/04/07/now-comes-the-discipline/ published on April 7, 2023
On Thursday’s podcast episode, I’ll be talking about how I’m not giving out brownie points or bonuses for people who look around and make statements of the obvious. In my mind, it’s a helluva lot more useful to tune in to people who can foresee the changes and warn you ahead of time. The hot air & hopium crowd who thought they could ignore RTO and it would go away were playing themselves.
And after being hit with everything from criticism to staff petitions, it seems the Amazon boss has reached the end of his tether.
In a “fishbowl” meeting earlier this month—a company name for a fireside chat—Jassy reportedly threw down the gauntlet, implying that if staff refused to come back to their desks they would not have a spot on the payroll.
“It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” Jassy said in a recording obtained by Insider. “And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.”
-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.
Yeah. Corpo America doesn’t care about your petitions and your angry Slack channels. Mmmkay. Highway don’t care!
For me, this is very similar to Zuck’s proclamation that some people needed to self-select out the door:
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to Reuters.
“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Zuckerberg added.
–https://nypost.com/2022/07/01/mark-zuckerberg-meta-wants-to-oust-workers-who-shouldnt-be-here/
I’ve warned you many times that the dissidents get purged. One of the main questions we find in Corpo America is: are you gonna go along to get along or are you gonna be a problem, pal?
Say it with me: if you don’t hold it, you don’t own it. Leadership gets to make these decisions and then mandate them to the serfs. Yes, the serfs can leave but allow me to caution you: there’s no way in hell we have a 3.7% unemployment rate. There’s no way in hell we have 2 legit open jobs for every 1 unemployed person. So when the dissidents either quit or get conveniently laid-off, where are they gonna go? Most likely to an in-person or hybrid role closer to where they live now and that’ll be after spending some time unemployed. Wait and see. Is this a pessimistic prediction? Yes, it is. a) If you want sunshine and roses, go somewhere else. b) Crony Capitalism is f**king working class people and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. *said as Arthur Fleck*
–https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/06/07/you-believed-a-lie/
I wish I hadn’t been right on all this, but here we are.
Let’s also take a look at the progression here from carrot to stick:
Amazon staff could be forgiven for their reluctance to return to their office. In September 2022 Jassy told staff he had no plans to ask them to return to their desks.
It came after a similarly relaxed message in October the year prior, when Jassy said managers would be allowed to decide how often they wanted their teams back in the building.
However by February 2023—less than six months after Jassy said he had “no plan” to force workers back—Amazon staffers were told they’d need to be back in the office the majority of the week.
Jassy reportedly reiterated a rhetoric that has emerged in more recent months: don’t comply with return to office, face the consequences.
In July, Insider reported that Amazon employees would be forced into a “voluntary resignation” if they refused to return unless they were one of the rare few who had obtained permission from the company’s leadership—internally named the S-team.
-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.
No plans for RTO. ➡️ Well, umm, I guess we’ll let individual managers decide that. ➡️ Less than 6 months after saying no RTO, it’s time to c’mon back. ➡️ C’mon back or leave. Maybe our company isn’t the place for you. Bye-bye.
Let’s say it again in unison: if you don’t own the company, you don’t ultimately make the rules on RTO vs WFH. And it doesn’t matter what they told you before!
Did you see this coming? Or were you listening to the toxic positivity crowd still pumping you – and themselves, quite frankly – up about the never-ending future of fully remote work?
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