Return-to-office anger creates white-collar guilt
On-the-ground employees say they support corporate counterparts
Eric Deshawn Lerma felt waves of anxiety when he sat down to tally the new costs in his 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 done their jobs from home.
Still, when Lerma heard some of his colleagues were organizing a walkout 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 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.
He ultimately decided, though, to 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 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.
At Amazon, more than 1,000 people walked off the job Wednesday, for one hour during lunchtime, according to organizers. They were protesting the company’s return-to-office rule, among other issues including layoffs and the company’s impact on the climate. Weeks earlier, employees voiced their frustrations with the RTO policy in a Remote Advocacy channel, with more than 30,000 members, on the Slack workplace messaging system.
The company has more than 350,000 corporate and tech employees globally. More than 800 in Seattle and 1,600 globally had pledged to participate in the walkout. The vast majority of Amazon’s more than 1 million workers, including those who formed a union at a Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse, have been working in person throughout the pandemic.
Apple, where employees issued open letters protesting in-person work, and the Gap have encountered a similar dynamic. At Starbucks, more than 70 named employees, along with others who remained anonymous, released a petition this year urging the company to permit them to keep working remotely. Members of the union representing Starbucks baristas have been supportive of these corporate workers, even though most of the company’s roughly 250,000 U.S. employees cannot work from home.
Indeed, many workers in warehouses and stores have been quick to show support for their corporate colleagues, noting they have nothing to gain from seeing office workers lose out on the flexibility the pandemic proved was possible.
“The work that we’re doing is in two separate fields,” said Anna Ortega, 23, who is active in Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, a group of warehouse workers, and has been working at an Amazon facility in San Bernardino, Calif., for almost two years. “It’s just showing us that Amazon has a problem with workers and listening to us.”
To Sarah Pappin, 32, a Starbucks shift supervisor in Seattle, what corporate employees are asking for is directly related to what store employees are demanding, such as increased COVID-19 safety protections.
“Even jobs that you might think of as dream jobs can be exploited,” she said. “I think there is a growing understanding that we’re all workers.”