After the Great Resignation, the Compelled Return
Amazon staff have been given their marching orders: back to the office, Sunshine! As of next year, the tech giant has made it mandatory for staff to be in the office five days a week, Reuters has reported. The obvious question is: will others follow suit?
As it happens, Amazon has a reputation for being a high-pressure workplace – and not just in the warehouses. However, it is not also the first company to advocate a return to the panopticon. Last year Jamie Dimon, boss of the bank JP Morgan, called on staff to get back to their desks, while back in 2013, Marissa Mayer, then chief-executive of Yahoo!, cancelled the company’s remote work policy, long before the pandemic made working from home commonplace.
Famously, Elon Musk, boss of X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla, has a distaste for staff wanting to work from home, but his plan to move X from San Francisco to a shed in rural Texas does rather suggest that he is quite prepared to decide where staff make their homes.
Interestingly, however, a report in the Financial Times found that Amazon’s move was very much in contrast to the tech industry as a whole, noting that only “3% of tech companies with more than 25,000 employees are back to five days in the office”. Almost three-quarters follow a structured hybrid pattern and 23% offer fully flexible terms, wrote the newspaper’s Stephen Morris and Stephanie Stacey.
Given this it is perhaps not surprising, then, that it is not only holders of fringe views on workers’ ability to self-manage, such as myself, who have taken note of Amazon’s move.
Justina Raskauskiene, human resources team lead at ecommerce marketing platform Omnisend, said the jury was out on whether or not the plan would work as not only had staff found some tasks easier to complete when alone, but also that many were enjoying the reduction in their commute.
“Only time will tell if Amazon’s decision to bring all corporate employees back for full-time office work will do more harm than good for the company. On one hand, taking away the opportunity for people to work remotely can harm the company’s chances of attracting the best talent in the market. The choice of future candidates will be limited to people working in certain cities that have Amazon offices,” she said.
Of course, remote work is not a viable option for every job, or indeed for every person, and there are downsides that need to be considered. However, anything that edges toward treating people as competent individuals should be welcomed. After all, things are not good out there. Despite decades of theory about the ‘post-Fordist’ workplace, and even older predictions of increased leisure time, workplaces, driven largely by tech, have not only become more authoritarian, but work itself has grown insecure as jobs have become de-professionalised under platform capitalism.
At the same time, presumably under the influence of American trends, businesses talk to staff in a cult-like manner: deploying tortured language to demand devotion to the organisation and hitherto unseen levels of commitment to meeting, often obscure, goals set by executives drunk on their own Cargo Cult-like obsession with ‘data’.
This is not matched by an equal devotion to workers on the part of the management, of course, and even the most subservient staffer will quickly be kicked to the curb if they are considered surplus to requirements – as an estimated 7,000 middle managers at Amazon are about to discover as an expected layoff programme kicks into gear. Indeed, the two seem to go hand-in-hand, with the loose bottom-rung used precisely to coerce loyalty.
As a result, demands that workers just shut up and get back to their desk seem petty and arbitrary, and while the desire to ensure staff are visible at all times is perhaps understandable, it also speaks to poor management skills. Managers may feel they have more control if they can literally watch staff at work, but that is, frankly, a sign of being unable to manage.
Nor has poor management ever been rare, frankly. The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was renowned for his strategy of ‘management by walking around’, which allowed him to develop an overview of what the company was doing and which projects were progressing. He was also known for being domineering, rude and unreasonable, as well as interfering in things he did not understand, facts even the slew of hagiographies singing his praises could not hide.
If the tech industry ever actually succeeds in willing an AI-led jobpocalypse into being – it is increasingly unclear that AI will significantly lengthen the dole queue, but shareholder hopes remain high – a worsening of working conditions would be inevitable. But it would mean businesses would be able to get the maximum juice from the workers it squeezed, regardless of whether they were of the robotic or the flesh and blood kind.
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