Amazon employees challenge 5-day-a-week office return

More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January.

In a letter sent to Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman last Wednesday, 523 employees protested the upcoming return-to-office mandate and urged Amazon executives to restore the flexibility of remote work.

“By taking this action, AWS is not living up to its full potential and is creating a bleak outlook for its future,” read the letter shared with The Seattle Times. “While it is absolutely true that there are challenges with flexible and remote work, we have always been a company that solves problems in new, exciting and innovative ways, rather than relying on antiquated approaches that happened to work well some time in the past.

“The cloud computing industry that we now base our work and livelihoods on might not exist today if we had adhered to that restrictive thinking in our early days.”

The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate that has been in place since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the initial three-day-a-week mandate as well, but Amazon did not change course. About 15 months later, it increased the requirement for in-office work in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms.

The employee letter is in response to comments from Garman at a recent AWS town hall meeting, where the new CEO told employees that if they did not want to comply with the five-day-a-week mandate, there are other companies around.

In an interview with The Seattle Times last week, Garman doubled down on those comments, confirming that he supports the new policy and believes employees work better when they are in the office together.

“It’s OK that’s not how everyone thinks that’s how they want to work,” Garman told The Times. “You can choose to go work for another company … Employees get to make the call.

“It won’t be perfect for everybody. I’m sure there’ll be a handful or some number of people that opt out,” he said.

Amazon’s current three-day-a-week mandate had not worked as the company had hoped, Garman said, because workers were often in the office on different days. He said 9 out of 10 people he has spoken with are “actually quite excited about this change.”

Garman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy have said there is room for flexibility under the new policy, like asking managers to stay home for the day to work on an individual project or to let in a dryer repair technician.

In the Wednesday letter, AWS employees said Garman’s comments were “inconsistent with the experiences of many employees.”

“You are silencing critical perspectives and damaging our culture and our future in doing so,” the workers wrote.

In the letter, workers said Amazon executives had not based their decision on data, flying in the face of one of Amazon’s own principles, and that the new mandate would be a step backward from achieving Amazon’s stated goal of becoming “Earth’s best employer.”

The new policy would disproportionately affect workers who rely on the flexibility of remote work, including those who have disabilities or caregiving responsibilities, and workers on a visa who could not risk losing their job.

It would also lead to the departure of more senior-level employees, who have the résumé and finances to search for a new job, making it more difficult for Amazon to achieve the type of collaborative environment it is seeking, the workers argued.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said Thursday “we understand that this may be a transition for some employees, which is why we’re sharing this guidance now, well before we expect employees to work from the office as they did prior to the pandemic.”

Amazon offers employees “a number of resources” to prepare for the change, Callahan continued, including access to “elder care options” and pet sitters.

The new return-to-office policy, announced in September and set to take effect Jan. 2, will set Amazon apart from most of its tech competitors and most other Seattle employers, who have opted for less stringent requirements.

Last week, Starbucks joined Amazon in taking a hard line against those who don’t want to comply with its return-to-office policy. Starbucks is requiring corporate employees to be in the office three days a week starting in January, saying in a recent memo that workers could comply or find a new job.

Amazon employees launched a similar protest in early 2023 after the company announced it would require workers to be in the office three days a week. Starting with letters and petitions, the effort culminated in a one-day walkout, where workers gathered on Zoom and outside of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to demand the company reconsider.

In the recent letter, AWS employees again asked Garman and other Amazon executives to rethink the policy and their position on in-office work.

“Remote and flexible work is an opportunity for Amazon to take the lead, not a threat,” the employees wrote. “We want to work for a company and for leaders that recognize and seize this moment to challenge us to reinvent how we work.”