Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sounds like a union. If an employee is fired, they can appeal to the union to get their job back. However, I've never seen a case where the union didn't side with the employee.
I'm betting they implemented this process to avoid true unionization.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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!
Isn't that about the same as forced arbitration? If the arbitrator doesn't vote in favor of the employer, then said employer will go out and find a new arbitrator.
After reading the article the outcome seems to be,
How is either of these outcome going to be better for the company or the employee?
I didn't fire the guy. His fellow inmates ... I mean cow-orkers ... made that decision.
This is what Catbert uses to amuse himself.
Wouldn't it be better to fire the boss? After all, if they are arguing to fire a 'good' employee, their judgement is faulty and they need to leave.
I used to work at Amazon...
Here is my performance review that basically said "Last chance before you are fired"
https://drive.google.com/open?...
Note: It is long
Isn't that about the same as forced arbitration?
Not really. You can lose in arbitration. But she can't lose in this process. She has three choices. If she chooses the 3rd, and the "jury" votes against her, she can still go back to option 1 or 2. So if she wants to keep her job, picking option 3 is a no-brainer.
However, I have found that when people are fired for cause, their co-workers are generally not very sympathetic. Peers are usually more aware than management of who is deadweight. Often the prevailing sentiment is "What took so long?"
I served at a Pivot jury a couple of times at Amazon. It's not unfair - people are selected randomly for it and from outside of employee's manager chain of command.
In both of the cases the employee was clearly not performing well and I personally haven't seen any evidence of bias. We were not coached to be pro-firing as well.
Wouldn't it be better to fire the boss? After all, if they are arguing to fire a 'good' employee, their judgement is faulty and they need to leave.
You would think so, wouldn't you? But bosses don't fire bosses, it hits too close to home. See, nobody cares about firing a good employee as long as they get to keep taking home their own paycheck. Quite the contrary: good employees are seen as threats.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
I recently (and for the first time) experienced that a colleague who was a highly valued hard worker in the eyes (and according to the peer reviews) of his colleagues was fired - seemingly just because a manager 3 levels above him disliked him, despite never having worked directly with him, even without ever having confronted him with whatever caused his antipathy. In this particular case, even the direct manager of the guy was fine with him, and did not understand why 2 levels above him a decision was made to get rid of the guy.
Had a "Jury" decided, no question the outcome would have been different.
If I'm reading this right, and I think I am, the part that everyone appears to be overlooking is that you can choose to receive a severance package when terminated for cause, and if instead of winning the "thunderdome debate" you lose, you still retain the option of accepting the performance package (meet these criteria in this period of time to keep your job) OR the severance package.
First, I've never heard of the average worker getting severance when fired for cause.
Second, why wouldn't you choose to have the video debate? Plead your case, even if you lose, the other two options remain on the table.
Third, this seems like yet another "if Amazon is doing it, it must be bad" articles - if a worker doesn't want to participate, take the package and go. If the worker wants to participate and loses, they can still take the package. The downside is what exactly?
The next time a coworker is fired, ask them if they'll get a severance package, then ask them if they'd like to debate the merits of their termination with their manager, without risking a severance package?
Ken