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Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I didn't think promotions are contractually obligated usually. As in you're not guaranteed a promotion and it's not written into your contract. So if Amazon, or any other company, wants to change the expectations for a promotion then as long as it is clearly communicated and given time to be adopted I don't see a problem if they want people to work on site. Especially if working from home is, also, not part of your contract.
You don't have to work for Amazon if you disagree. Find a, much better, job elsewhere.
That's the idea. It's illegal for Amazon to fire people for not wanting to return on-site, so they do the legally allowed minimum to condition promotions based on that. Legal, but still shitty. They hired a ton of remote (by contract) workers during the pandemic and made a shit ton of profit, now they don't know how to get rid of them without a severance package.
It depends what's in their contract. I honestly don't know. I'm guessing based on zero experience of working in Amazon and am using my knowledge of European employment as a baseline. Of course, your mileage may vary in the US?
In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.
The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.