Amazon workers at the company’s Seattle headquarters are planning a walk off over the company’s layoffs, as well as RTO mandates.
According to The Washington Post, employees posted their plans via Slack and email, urging walk off on May 31. The plans are in response to the company’s mass layoffs, as reneging on its remote work policy, forcing employees back in the office at least three days a week.
“Morale feels like it’s at an all-time low,” a Los Angeles-based employee who plans to participate in the walk off, told the Post. “In meetings and one-on-ones with colleagues, there’s so much uncertainty and lack of clarity from leadership. … It’s an unsettling time to work at Amazon.”
Organizers hope to draw some 1,000 participants, tapping into the sense of betrayal many feel over the layoffs.
“At many of these high-tech firms, there’s a certain sense of creating a new world, something better,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told the Post. “When you have a particular sense of a grievance and a righteousness, you can still have a worker or employee action, even in periods of recession or depression. Sometimes that’s transcended by a sense of moral outrage.”
Experts have warned that companies could face substantial backlash from layoffs, and companies have done little to quell those concerns. In fact, news recently broke that some of the companies that have laid off the most employees have been sponsoring H1-B visas by the thousands to bring in low-cost foreign workers to replace laid-off ones.
