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Amazon‘s annual campaign to pay customers to quit is coming at an inopportune time for employees hoping to unionize in Bessemer, Alabama!
The company’s policy, which offers current employees an “exit bonus” (dubbed “The Offer”) to leave, is catching flack on Twitter for possibly interfering with a local workers’ group efforts there, Vice reports.
A “historic union election” is just weeks away in Bessemer, and Amazon is offering the folks their first chance to accept money “to leave Amazon and never come back.” What a time to be alive!
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Writer Kim Kelly reported on The Offer campaign on Twitter, amid purported "anti-union propaganda" efforts there.
Okay! I deleted my earlier thread on Amazon offering buyouts to workers in Bessemer because it was missing important context. Amazon does this every February; the Bessemer facility only opened last March, so this is the first time it’s being offered there. Workers are freaked out pic.twitter.com/bYvHF3T6Yu
— Kim Kelly (@GrimKim) February 22, 2021
"On Sunday, there were concerns on Twitter that the drive was specifically targeted at the Bessemer warehouse, but Amazon runs this program nationally and has for several years," Vice reports.
In the internal memo Kelly acquired it states: "We love that you're part of the team. But if you have goals outside of Amazon, we want to support you. That's why we have a voluntary resignation program called 'The Offer' — an exit bonus starting at $1,000, based on how many Peaks you've worked."
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The program was adopted years ago after Amazon acquired Zappos. In fact, it was a Zappos company policy aimed at filtering out those who "don't have the sense of commitment they are looking for." Makes sense!
Though the program predated union efforts in Bessemer, the people hoping for change there will be impacted because employees who accept the offer will no longer be eligible to vote or have a voice on the matter.
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"I researched and found out they do it at a lot of facilities and what not. But it was a good time to do it now in Bessemer. That could hurt the votes,” Michael Foster, one of the leaders of Bessemer’s union drive, told Motherboard. “If they quit the vote won’t count. To me it’s just to prevent the people from getting the union in. They need to thin out some people. It’s kind of a polite way to do it." Yikes!
Our eyes will be on this ongoing story!
