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Amazon Workers Facing Firing Can Appeal To a Jury of Their Co-Workers (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jane was working in Amazon's Seattle headquarters when she was asked to a meeting with her manager and a human resources representative. They gave her a document outlining concerns about her work performance and spelled out three choices. She could quit and receive severance pay, spend the next several weeks trying to keep her job by meeting certain performance goals, or square off with her manager in a videoconference version of the Thunderdome, pleading her case with a panel of co-workers while her boss argued against her. Jane, who asked that her real name not be used to discuss a personal matter, chose the last one.
Amazon is borrowing a page from union grievance processes that don't apply to most corporate employees. But only about 30 percent of those who appeal their manager's criticisms prevail, meaning they can keep their jobs or seek new ones within the company with different bosses, according to people familiar with the matter. Eighteen months after its debut, the hearing process has created resentment and raised questions about fairness, according to current and former workers as well as attorneys familiar with their situations. "It's a kangaroo court," says George Tamblyn, a Seattle employment lawyer who helped one former Amazon worker plan her appeal earlier this year. "My impression of the process is it's totally unfair." According to a person familiar with the process, the workers who fail to make their case and get their job back can still choose between severance pay or a performance-improvement plan. The program, called "Pivot," was started last year.
Here's what Amazon has to say on the matter: "Pivot is a uniquely Amazonian program that was thoughtfully designed to provide a fair and transparent process for employees who need support. When employees are placed in Pivot, they have the option of working with their manager and HR to improve with a clear plan forward, of leaving Amazon with severance, or of appealing if they feel they shouldn't be in the program. Just over a year into program, we're pleased with the support it offers our employees and we're continuing to iterate based on employee feedback and their needs."
Amazon is borrowing a page from union grievance processes that don't apply to most corporate employees. But only about 30 percent of those who appeal their manager's criticisms prevail, meaning they can keep their jobs or seek new ones within the company with different bosses, according to people familiar with the matter. Eighteen months after its debut, the hearing process has created resentment and raised questions about fairness, according to current and former workers as well as attorneys familiar with their situations. "It's a kangaroo court," says George Tamblyn, a Seattle employment lawyer who helped one former Amazon worker plan her appeal earlier this year. "My impression of the process is it's totally unfair." According to a person familiar with the process, the workers who fail to make their case and get their job back can still choose between severance pay or a performance-improvement plan. The program, called "Pivot," was started last year.
Here's what Amazon has to say on the matter: "Pivot is a uniquely Amazonian program that was thoughtfully designed to provide a fair and transparent process for employees who need support. When employees are placed in Pivot, they have the option of working with their manager and HR to improve with a clear plan forward, of leaving Amazon with severance, or of appealing if they feel they shouldn't be in the program. Just over a year into program, we're pleased with the support it offers our employees and we're continuing to iterate based on employee feedback and their needs."
Better watch that movie again. For this to truly be 'thunderdome' ...two (men) enter, one (man) leaves... her boss would have to have some skin in the game too.
Now if she got to argue her case and either she got fired, or her boss got fired and she took his place, THAT would be thunderdome!
Big company firing process.
1st unwritten step. Make them (more) miserable. Most of the actual 'picked on, good employees' just find a better gig.
By the time they have 3 written and signed write ups etc, everybody knows what's coming. I'm kind of amazed 30% keep their jobs. Amazon must have incredibly shitty managers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That co-workers have a different opinion than the management is clear. That they always have a clearer and more realistic view of somebody's performance is questionable. They have bias just as their bosses do. Plus if somebody has been charged with something bad then there is surely something to it or?. Group think is as common as bad bosses. What can be useful however is that the chances for a discussion in a panel exists while the boss often enough makes his decision based rumours and own misconceptions. So maybe a panel is better at least sometimes.
Often, management is relatively clueless about their own operations. They don't always know who the critical members of their team are.
A few years back, I was pushed out of a company because the chief of operations thought I was their weakest developer, and that the actual weakest dev was their rockstar. I was heavily specialized in database and backend coding, which management didn't see as important because they never got client complaints about it. Rather than seeing that as "this dev writes solid code", they saw it as "this dev is slower than Rockstar". Now, Rockstar would push code to production as soon as it compiled, only getting away with it because his main task was endless revisions on a social media network with maybe a dozen users that weren't funding the project, and he constantly relied on other devs to do anything outside his limited skillset (I wrote basically every database query for that project, despite never being assigned to it).
Had there been a "jury of my peers", I'd have been completely vindicated. But, they weren't the type to listen to their peons, let alone ask their opinion. So, out the door I went. And half the company followed in the next year.
Now, in my case, there was no higher level of management, and few people will set up a system to protect their company from their own mistakes. Amazon, however, is big enough to have several layers of management between the ground level and the board room. They can benefit from a mechanism to protect from bad frontline managers' staffing decisions. This is pretty unconventional, and I can see some potential defects in their specific implementation, but the principle seems sound.