Amazon workers walk out over cost of return to office
Amazon worker Eric Deshawn Lerma felt waves of anxiety when he sat down to tally the new costs in his work routine since Amazon’s return to the office this spring.
There’s parking. There’s fuel. There’s lunch. They add up to at least $200 extra a month, all to support a policy whose justification he can’t fully understand — after three years in which he and his teammates have been doing their jobs from home.
Still, when Lerma heard that some of his colleagues were organizing a walkout Wednesday to protest the return-to-office policy, which asks employees to come in at least three days a week, he initially wavered on whether to participate. After all, he realizes that thousands of Amazon workers have no flexibility to work from home. Their jobs require them to go into warehouses to do physically taxing labor each day.
“It really provided me with a sense of internal conflict about working from home being a luxury or a right,” said Lerma, 27, who is an executive assistant in Seattle and joined the company, where he feels he has grown personally and professionally, in 2022. “There are different rights and amenities afforded to my role.”
He said he would join virtually.
“While warehouse workers have much harsher working conditions than I do,” he said, “I should still be able to reserve the right to protect my autonomy as an employee.”
Thousands of corporate employees, across industries, who remain adamant that they do not want to return to the office are now confronting a tension: How do their demands compare with those of the millions of workers whose jobs have never permitted them the ease of remote work? And can a corporate employee’s
advocacy be of use to workers, including those trying to unionize, outside the corporate sphere?
This tension follows a pandemic that exacerbated the divide between white-collar workers who could do their jobs from the safety of their homes and workers who often could not and were exposed to higher COVID-19 risks.
Simultaneously, workers in both the corporate and
noncorporate realms have re-evaluated their working conditions, quit their jobs in waves and called for higher wages — all amid a tight labor market at one point called a “workers economy.”
The unemployment rate this spring has remained low, at 3.4%, with wages rising.
At Amazon, hundreds of corporate employees walked off the job Wednesday during lunchtime, in protest of the company’s return-tooffice
rule, among other issues including layoffs and the company’s impact on the climate.
Wearing a black pirate hat and red coat, Church Hindley, a quality assurance engineer, said working from home allowed him to live a better, healthier life.
“I’m not suited for in-office work,” Hindley said. “I deal with depression and anxiety, and I was able to get off my anxiety medication and start living my life.”
In a statement, Amazon said it supported the rights of workers to express their opinions.
The company has more than 350,000 corporate and tech employees globally. Some employees, particularly working parents, pin some of their frustration to the financial toll of returning to the office, especially the cost and pressures of child care.