A year ago, Tara Jones, an Amazon warehouse worker in Oklahoma, nursed her newborn, glanced at her pay stub on her phone and saw that she was paid a significant chunk: $90 out of $540.
The mistake kept repeating even after complaining. Jones, who had taken an accounting class at community college, became so desperate that he wrote an email to the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
“I’m behind on the bills because the pay team messed up,” she wrote weeks later. “I’m crying as I write this email.”
Unbeknownst to Jones, her message to Bezos set off an internal investigation and a discovery: Jones was far from alone. According to a confidential report on the findings, for at least 1 1/2 years — during a period of record profit — Amazon was shortening new parents, patients dealing with medical crises, and other vulnerable workers on leave. Some salary calculations in her facility were wrong as it opened its doors a year ago. Of the other warehouses of the companies, 179 were potentially affected.
Amazon is still identifying and paying workers today, according to company spokeswoman Kelly Nantel.
According to dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by The New York Times, the error is only one edge in a long-standing array of problems with Amazon’s system for handling paid and unpaid leaves. Together, the records and interviews show that the issues are more widespread – affecting the company’s blue-collar and white-collar workers – and more harmful than previously known, which many company insiders have attributed to it. Described as one of the most serious HR problems.
Workers facing medical problems and other life crises across the country have been fired after attendance software mistakenly marked them as no-shows, according to former and current human resources staff members, some who retaliated. only spoke anonymously for fear of Doctors’ notes disappeared into black holes in Amazon’s database. Employees also struggled to reach their case managers, wandering through the automated phone trees that routed their calls to overwhelmed back-office employees in Costa Rica, India and Las Vegas. And the entire holiday system ran on a patchwork of programs that often didn’t talk to each other.
Some employees who were ready to return found that the system was too backed up to process them, resulting in weeks or months of loss of income. High-paid corporate employees, who had to navigate similar systems, found that arranging regular leave could turn into a quagmire.
In internal correspondence, company administrators warned of “inadequate service levels,” “short processes” and the systems “prone to delay and error.”
The extent of the problem is greatly relieved by how Amazon employees regularly took a back seat to customers during the company’s meteoric rise to retail dominance. Amazon built state-of-the-art package processing facilities to satisfy buyers’ appetite for fast delivery, which are far ahead of competitors. But according to many longtime employees, the business didn’t put enough resources and attention into how it serves employees.
“At times, because we’ve optimized for the customer experience, we’re focused on that,” Bethany Reyes, who was recently put in charge of fine-tuning the vacation system, said in an interview. She stressed that the company is working hard to rebalance those priorities.
The company’s dealings with its vast workforce – now more than 1.3 million people and rapidly expanding – are facing increasing scrutiny. Labor activists and some lawmakers say the company does not adequately protect the safety of warehouse workers, and that it unfairly punishes internal critics. This year, workers in Alabama, troubled by the company’s minute-by-minute monitoring of their productivity, posed a serious, though ultimately unsuccessful, threat of unionization against the company.
In June, a Times investigation detailed how badly the vacation process jammed during the pandemic, finding that it was one of several employment defaults during the company’s biggest moment of financial success. Since then, Amazon has kept to its pledge to be “earth’s best employer.” Andy Jesse, who replaced Bezos as CEO in July, recently chose the vacation system as a place where it can demonstrate its commitment to improvement. “The process didn’t work out the way we wanted it to work,” he said at an event this month.
In response to recent findings on the troubles faced by its holiday program, Amazon elaborated on its efforts to fix the system’s “pain points” and “payment issues,” as Reyes put it in the interview. She called the wrongful termination “the most serious issue you could have”. The company is hiring hundreds of employees, streamlining and connecting systems, clarifying its communications and training human resources staff members to be more empathetic.
But many issues remain, leading to breakdowns that have proved disastrous. This spring, a Tennessee warehouse worker suddenly stopped receiving disability payments, leaving her family struggling to pay for food, transportation, or medical care.
“Not a word that there was ever a problem,” said 54-year-old James Watts, who worked at the Amazon in Chattanooga for six years before repeated heart attacks and strokes forced him to go on disability leave. . His sudden loss of benefits caused a cascade of disasters: because he had been without pay for two weeks, his car was confiscated. To cover the bills for food and doctors, Watts and his wife sold their wedding rings.
“We are losing everything,” he said.
Benefits resumed several months later without any explanation, but the couple is still struggling to find their footing. Nantel said Amazon regretted Watts’ position, that the process was too confusing and that it was working to simplify the process of navigating leaves.
As the country’s second largest private employer, Amazon offers a wide range of vacations – paid or unpaid, medical or personal, legally mandated or not. While Amazon used to outsource the management of its holiday events, it brought in an in-house effort when providers couldn’t keep up with its development. It is now one of the largest holiday administrators in the country.
Employees apply for vacations online, on an internal app, or wade through an automated phone tree. The technology Amazon uses to manage leaves is a patchwork of software from various companies — including Salesforce, Oracle and Cronos — that don’t seamlessly connect.
That complexity forces human resources staff to input multiple accepted leaves, an effort that last fall alone required 67 full-time employees, an internal document shows. Reyes said a permanent bridge between the programs is due to be completed in March, with incremental improvements in the meantime.
Current and former employees involved in administering the leaves say the company’s answer is often to push them so hard that some leave the essentials themselves. Last year, in an email sent on Friday about the Sunday deadline, a corporate manager of the holiday system scolded his teams for doing more.
“You all know what needs to be accomplished and by how long,” he wrote. “no exception!”
Reyes said employee burnout was a big concern for her as she was taking on her new role and she was trying to address it in a number of ways.
Amazon’s own teams haven’t always been well-versed with the system, internal documents show. An external assessment last found that back-office staff members who spoke with employees “did not understand” the leave-taking process and regularly misinformed workers. In an audit call that lasted 29 minutes, the phone agent told a worker he was too new to be eligible for short-term disability leave, when in fact workers are eligible from day one.
Reyes said that with better training, his teams can now resolve more than nine out of 10 issues on the first call.
In some cases, Amazon has been accused of violating the law. In 2017, Leslie Tullis, who managed a subscription product for children, faced a growing domestic violence crisis and requested an unpaid leave that employers must offer under Washington state law to protect victims. . Once approved, Tullis will be allowed to operate intermittently; She may be absent from work as much as necessary, and with short notice; And he will be saved from vengeance.
Amazon vacated, but the company didn’t seem to understand what it said yes to. It had no policy that conformed to the law of the company’s home state, court documents show. Tullis said she spent eight hours a week working with the company to manage her leave. At one point, she was on a regular walk to keep her children safe. Despite the legal protection, when she was behind at work, her boss was clearly disappointed, “as if I was cheating on them every day,” she said.
In June 2019, she was fired for missing a deadline of two days, after taking two days off to deal with the latest emergency in an ongoing family crisis just ahead of a demonstration plan. The Washington state attorney general’s office took up its case calling Amazon’s holiday reporting system “a failure” and argued that the company retaliated in violation of state law.
Amazon is fighting the case. Nantel said the company provided Tulis with flexibility and support, plus the equivalent of about seven months of unpaid leave over two years. She said that Tullis was fired not in retaliation but because her performance had deteriorated when she was not on leave.
Just before he was fired, he emailed his manager, stunned to see that the deadline had not been pushed back to accommodate the exact type of crisis the leave law protects. “Domestic violence is a series of emergencies,” Tullis wrote in an email, “and the victims don’t get to pick it up when it ends.”
This article is originally from . appeared in the new York Times.
Jodi Kantor, Karen Weiss and Grace Ashford c.2021 The New York Times Company
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