Leaked screenshot shows Amazon is now tracking individual employee office attendance records, reversing its anonymized data policy

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 562 points –
Leaked screenshot shows Amazon is now tracking individual employee office attendance records, reversing its anonymized data policy
businessinsider.com

Leaked screenshot shows Amazon is now tracking individual employee office attendance records, reversing its anonymized data policy::Amazon is now sharing individual employee office attendance records in its latest move to force workers back to the office.

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Red flag, working conditions must be bad.

I mean they are notorious for having horrible working conditions even for developers lol

Meh.

20/hr+, good healthcare, and you keep busy so the day goes by fast.

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The more people agree to work for and comply with evil corporations, the more the world will come to reflect their evil ideas.

I doubt the guy working as a slave in an Amazon warehouse has a gamut of options to choose from

They actually have many options, no way Amazon is the only employer that would employ them, and they chose Amazon probably because it's actually the least evil of options or somewhat "better" in something. It doesn't have to be actually better in terms of work or pay etc. but perhaps how easy it was to commute (though I heard Amazon has plenty of work benefits actually)
Now other employers have to compete because they need an employee too. So they try to one up Amazon. If they get good enough Amazon will lose too many employees and have to one up the other employers. etc.

Ok but this clearly doesn't seem to work well, right? Wages stagnating and harsh work etc. This is probably related to many factors but I guess job security is a big one, people don't job hop as much and fear getting fired homeslessness etc. Another one is too many potential employees to choose for limited spots (with the increasing levels of automation in every kind of work), so much that employers can actually down on their work conditions and say "ok then, whoever can stand these conditions for this price can work here".

I'm not some economist or something but I believe UBI or some derivative of it at least would be the leverage for that. If someone who just got fired were to receive 1000$ per months on top of their current savings for 24 months, they won't be so much of a risk and won't be inclined to work in a 1200$ per month job either. We don't actually need this constant race of upping minimum wage and many other band aid regulations if that could be a thing.

The premise is the same, unfortunately. Desperate people do desperate things, but it reflects on the world around them.

What could go wrong?

I’m wondering if they get away with it despite the lack of stock movement. So much of staff compensation is tied to stock price. Staff previously got RSUs allocated and stayed because they went up in value every year but lately it’s been stagnant. People are less likely to put up with this bullshit if there is no big payout at the end.

What stock price are looking at? It's up 50% this year.

And before you quote that it's lower than its peak during COVID, so is the majority of not all big tech firms.

The stock vests across 4 years and then you get a refresh. There are a lot of staff that started 2019-2022 that are thinking about their lost value. Amazon will offer extra stock so they don’t lose money but many people are driven to work there from stories of the people previoiusly that would see their share price increase dramatically month to month like from 2013-2020. That’s what everyone got used to. So if you were told you got 60k of RSUs across 4 years, you knew it was really like 150k at least. For those that started like 4ish years ago that is no longer the case and I wonder how it will impact staff attrition.

Isn't this illegal in Europe?

Yes! Tracking employees performance is a big no no 🙄

In Germany you can't fire someone because of "performance evaluation".

What does this actually mean? Can you literally sit on the desk all day, doing nothing or mess everything up, and your employer has to pay you still?
Performance evaluation is a pretty broad word

Must suck ass to work with there then. I can't stand teammates not pulling their weight. Germany ain't Europe BTW.

Germany ain't Europe BTW.

I understand that this person is playing the heel/troll to get a rise out of people, but can we for a moment appreciate how hilarious this sentence is?

Can you imagine how uneducated AND unwilling to learn a person in 2023 would have to be, to not only think that Germany isn't in Europe (it's on both the continent of Europe and a long-time key member of the European Union), but to not know how to check that their Information is correct with a quick Google?

Honestly I nearly spat out my tea laughing, impressive heeling!

You misunderstood what he said. He is saying that Germany isn't all of Europe, that there is more to Europe then just Germany. He is completely right in this context, not all European countries have the same workers right as Germany.

He is still a bootlicking troll though.

He is completely right in this context, not all European countries have the same workers right as Germany.

I understand that this isn't an academic discussion on logic, but it's also not correct to claim that Europe doesn't have basic worker's rights because there might be a country or two in the dozens of countries that make up Europe that might not have explicitly prohibit a specific form of abuse.

Ooh I see! I didn't realise that's what they meant.

Yeah, that would totally ruin a country's economy. Like, I'm sure if I were to look it up, I would see that Germany is doing real bad 🙄

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The new badge report for individual employees is a reversal from Amazon's previous policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated office attendance data, which it said was shared with managers, primarily for safety and space planning purposes.

For example, at a recent internal townhall meeting, Amazon's SVP Peter DeSantis told his engineering team that office badging data is "informational" and only shared in "very aggregated ways," as Insider previously reported.

In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson Rob Munoz said badge data does not account for reported paid-time off, personal time, or work from a non-corporate building.

The memo added badge data is not available to employees in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Korea, or Taiwan.

"We're providing this data to help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues," said the memo, obtained by Insider.

Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy, meanwhile, told employees in an internal meeting last month that it's "past" the time to commit to the company's RTO policy, saying "it's probably not going to work out" for those refusing to comply.


The original article contains 547 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This has always been a thing, at least while I was there. I was able to look up Bezos’ performance and attendance. Internal stuff was pretty transparent and it’s what I loved about the job.

erm. What would a Bezos performance quantification look like?

Was a 100% bald, greedy fuck all day.

Baldness and greediness increased by 12% Year over Year. We saw an overall decline in employee health, for that I want to thank the board and our shareholders, we couldn't have done it without them.

I sincerely doubt that.

I wish I had a screenshot myself… haven’t been there for 3 years now. None of this information is visible without being on site with a physical security key fob. May have had to of also been a tier 3 employee and up.

I left Amazon as an L6 after a decade, and we never had access to that sort of data.

Is it possible that you were a clueless L6? I may be mistaken at the level of stuff you could see but you definitely could view everyone’s task and the time in which they were on it. Bezo’s had a lot of “time off task” logged. As just a tier 3 I knew more about a majority of things that my L4’s never bothered to learn or know about.

Is it possible that you're full of shit?

No, I’m not one to completely make up shit on the internet, but I do know who to steer clear of when I come across them.

Wow, an employer is tracking when employees are at work? Outrageous!

Yes, but not sarcastic.

Why does your employer need to track all employees? Do those employees not generally have managers? Are those managers unable to see when an employee is absent? That never seemed to be an issue before such technology existed. Was productivity so down that it became necessary?

Also, don't they have basic timesheets? I'm salaried and I still have to fill out a timesheet.

It says its made to assist managers with decision making.

Not sure on the timesheet thing.

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It's not about tracking if they are working, it's about tracking if they are at the office.

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I love how you people royally freak the fuck out because you are being monitored at work.

Of all the stupid bullshit to waste your rage and political capital on, this one, is a candidate to take the cake.

You people choke down this rage bait like a MAGA trumpet glued to Alex Jones.

Here is an idea, do your fucking job LMAO. You people get enraged over "nobody wants to work" and yet here you all are losing your shit that your getting caught not working 🤣.

People have been doing their job fine working from home. It works. It's only Luddites that haven't transitioned to the 21st century that are objecting to working from home.

You think your productivity isn't being tracked at home?

badging in is not productivity. There are lots of people who go to the office, badge in, and spend the whole day gossiping around the coffee machine. Are you among them?

At my office, you badge in to any of the side doors, but can walk right through the front door.

So it's the same problem, but the opposite. Go to the office, don't badge in, be productive all day. Badging in is not productivity.

It's one of many KPIs that can be evaluated to create a larger picture. I'm pretty sure the aggregation of data is powerful shit. But who knows, I could be wrong.

For jobs that literally require you to be there in person to do your work, maybe. But if you only need a laptop and an internet connection to work, tracking badging and time spent in the office absolutely does not measure productivity, especially for a tech giant like Amazon of all places. Bottom line is they want people back in the office because they are paying for all those empty buildings, not because there’s a dip in productivity due to remote work.

Who do you mean by "you people"?