“Amazon is making it harder for disabled employees to get permission to work from home,” reports Bloomberg, a move they say shows Amazon’s “determination” to enforce a five-days-a-week return to the office.
The company recently told employees with disabilities that it was implementing a more rigorous vetting process, both for new requests to work from home and applications to extend existing arrangements. Affected workers must submit to a “multilevel leader review” and could be required to return to the office for monthlong trials to determine if accommodations meet their needs… Affected employees are receiving calls from “accommodation consultants” who explain how the new policy works. They review medical documentation and discuss how effective working from home has been for employees who’ve already received an accommodation as well as any previous attempts to help the person work in the office. If the consultant agrees that the person should be allowed to work from home, another Amazon manager must sign off. If they don’t, the request goes to a third manager…
Some workers fear the process was designed to make requests less likely to be approved, two employees said. In internal chat rooms, according to one of them, employees have accused [Chief Executive Officer Andy] Jassy of hypocrisy because the bureaucratic process belies his stated determination to cut through red tape that he says is slowing Amazon down.
“Jassy says the return-to-office requirement will strengthen the company’s culture, which he believes has suffered since the pandemic and become overly bureaucratic,” the article points out. But it adds that down at the workforce level, the move “is seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce.”
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