• Amazon employees criticized a new five-day RTO mandate in internal Slack messages.
• Amazon’s return-to-office policy was already strict.
• An Amazon RTO Slack channel was “burning” with so many comments and reactions.

Some Amazon employees took to an internal Slack channel to blast the company after it announced plans to require corporate employees to work in the office five days a week.

One staffer was so upset they issued a plea to Business Insider, which has covered Amazon’s RTO crackdown extensively. This person was particularly concerned by CEO Andy Jassy’s contention that the new mandate was just resetting how the company operated before the pandemic revolutionized how the modern world works.

“To the BI reporter who will inevitably quote mine this channel today,” the employee wrote on Slack. “Please do note that this is (in a lot of cases) significantly more strict and out of its mind than many teams operated under pre-covid. This is not ‘going back’ to how it was before. It’s just going backwards.”

Other Amazon workers weighed in, too, on a company Slack channel dedicated to RTO-related topics. One Amazon employee told BI that this channel was “burning” with so many comments and reactions.

“What ever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer,” one of the employees wrote, referring to one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles.

Amazon has a reputation as a relatively tough place to work, especially compared to other big tech companies such as Google. Amazon’s RTO policy was already strict, but Jassy just doubled down hard on the company’s in-office approach.

“Can I negotiate my manager to PIP me,” one employee wrote in reference to Amazon’s famously ruthless performance improvement plan. “Take my money and leave?”

“So if I go in 5x week, that means I can leave my laptop at work right? There’s no reason to bring it home,” another staffer person wrote.

In July, Amazon started enforcing a “return-to-hub” mandate. Hubs are central locations assigned to each individual team, and employees have to work out of those hubs instead of any office nearest to their current city. Those who choose not to comply were expected to find another team, or take what the company calls “voluntary resignation” meaning the company will interpret the lack of RTO compliance as if the employee quit their job.

“It’s day 1169,” one employee wrote on Monday, referring to the number of days since Andy Jassy became CEO on July 5, 2021.

The comment refers to founder Jeff Bezos’s philosophy that it’s “always Day 1 at Amazon,” meaning the company should always be “curious, nimble, and experimental.”

Bezos described a Day 2 mentality as “stasis,” “irrelevance,” and “excruciating, painful decline.”

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