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Amazon Worker Jumps Off Company Building After Email Note (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An Amazon employee was injured when he leaped off a building at the company's Seattle headquarters in what police characterized as a suicide attempt. The man, who wasn't identified by authorities, sent an e-mail visible to hundreds of co-workers, including Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, before the incident occurred, according to a report on Bloomberg. The man survived the fall from Amazon's 12-story Apollo building at about 8:45 a.m. local time Monday and was taken to a Seattle hospital, police said. The man had recently put in a request to transfer to a different department, but was placed on an employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing company personnel matters. More than 20,000 people work in multiple buildings at Amazon's headquarters.
employee improvement plan, a step that can lead to termination if performance isn't improved
Whoever invented "employee improvement plan" needs to die.
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This seems to be very common at Amazon. Going by the FACE site, it shows a clear pattern of abuse, and I'm not surprised that this hasn't happened before.
Granted the FACE site is posted to those who are usually pissed at Amazon, but with so many postings and so often it shows that there is a clear pattern of employee abuse.
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If you compared the statistics of suicide for FoxConn vs China as a whole you actually had a reduced chance working for FoxConn.
That doesn't help sell a narrative, but that's how statistics work.
I don't know what you imagine you get out of being callous - other than making yourself look slightly less than human. Workplace bullying really ought to be something that everybody worried about; nobody is immune to the very serious, mental health problems that this can cause, and trying to appear "tough" only makes you all the more vulnerable.
The jump wasn't from the 12th floor, which is why he survived. He only fell about 20 feet. http://www.seattlepi.com/local...
If you get 20,000 people together for ANY reason, you are going to get at least a few who are not mentally well. The US has 12.1 suicides per 100,000 people annually. That means that in a random group of 20,000 people in the USA you would expect 2-3 of them to try to (successfully) commit suicide in a given year and presumable some number more to attempt it. One guy in a company that large does not justify drawing any deeper conclusions than he was one of those 2-3 people.
EIP or IIP (Individual Improvement Plans) are a staple of the U.S.'s highly litigious society. If you are a bad performer and I want to fire you I can't just do it. I have to be able to prove you are a bad employee. That means I have to document why you are bad and give you a chance to prove to me that you can be a better employee.
So say you are habitually late. I have to prove that you're late (No time clocks, don't you know, but RFID ID badges can usually be used to document a worker's habitual tardiness.) Then I have to have a meeting with you, with a witness from HR, where I clearly tell you that being habitually tardy is against company policy and can result in your termination. You typically sign a form saying that I've told you that being tardy is against company policy and that it can lead to your termination. You also promise to be on time in writing. That is your 'improvement.' Typically there is some duration of time the IIP is in effect, so that if you're late once three years after our talk I can't fire you. Usually its a period like three or six months. If you complete the IIP period successfully the IIP may be destroyed, retain for some specific period or go in your permanent work record, depending upon company policy.
In many states if you are fired for cause (that is because you are habitually late, like in our example) then the employer is not required to pay for you under their unemployment insurance program, just like they don't have to pay if you quit. As a matter of fact in most states all firings are for cause. Terminating you because of other reasons is call being "laid off" and almost always makes you eligible for unemployment payments.
He fell only 20 feet.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Amazon-worker-leaps-from-building-at-Seattle-10640986.php
h/t Wooky Monster https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9934505&cid=53385601
Agreed. I have 2 friends who work there doing kernel related dev for AWS, not only are they paid ridiculously well (before you even take stock options into account even), they rarely have complaints that aren't just stock standard for a massive company (like some managers being useless, underperforming coworkers, etc).