From CNBC:
Amazon has a solution for employees who no longer want to work there — pay them to quit.
Once a year, the company offers to pay full-time associates at Amazon fulfillment centers up to $5,000 to leave the company. Employees are eligible after one year of service, but there is a caveat: Those who accept the offer can never work at Amazon again.
“We want people working at Amazon who want to be here,” Amazon spokesperson Melanie Etches tells CNBC Make It via email. “In the long-term, staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company.”
The company offers $2,000 to employees who have been at the company one year, and the offer increases by $1,000 per year of tenure, maxing out at $5,000.
. . . .
Amazon claims that they don’t actually want employees to accept the offer. In fact, the headline on the memo states “Please Don’t Take This Offer,” according to founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
So why bother presenting it in the first place?
“The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want,” Bezos writes in a 2014 shareholder letter. And according to Amazon, few people actually accept.
. . . .
“If you choose to actually not take the money and you choose to stay, it means that you’re committed to the organization and committed to your work,” says Burchell. “It helps to frame the employer/employee bargain or that psychological contract.”
In effect, employees who decline the offer are psychologically “signing on the bottom line” and recommitting to the company, says Burchell. This makes them more engaged, more productive, and ultimately boosts Amazon’s bottom line.
Link to the rest at CNBC
This idea may have some other benefits. A lot of dissatisfied workers start slacking off, eventually leading to their being fired. The thing is, the unemployment paid out causes the company’s costs to rise.
By offering this benefit, they can virtually guarantee that they will reduce their claims.
Reduce their claims? Good grief, that’s seriously out of whack.
In this neck of the woods, unemployment insurance premiums are paid by the employee as a deduction at the source from wages; which makes sense, as it is the employee and not the employer who is at risk of being unemployed. But never mind that.
In jurisdictions where the employers pay the premiums, even in those where the premiums are linked to claims by each firm’s former employees, when an employee is fired with cause it is not supposed to affect the employer’s costs. I don’t see where the ‘virtual guarantee’ comes in.
I don’t know about other states, but in ours unemployment insurance premiums are not paid by the employee, but are paid by the employer. And if I let even one employee go, my base rate goes up. And fighting the agency is difficult. I once had them call me the chargeable employer for an employee who I still employed; she had been let go by her other employer (she worked here part time on days that she didn’t work for the other guy). It took months to get it straightened out. I spent a bunch of time I didn’t have making unanswered/unreturned calls and writing letters. If I actually got charged for a termination, I’d probably let it go just because I don’t have the time or resources to fight it…
I think Zappos made a similar offer to employees before Amazon bought the company.
They only ‘steal’ the ‘best’ ideas! 😉
If working at/for Amazon is as bad as some people want us to believe then why aren’t more of them taking that money and burning that bridge?
They don’t quit because it’s the best job they can get at the time; the others that they’re qualified for are even worse.
And your point? Even if they leave they don’t burn that bridge by grabbing the cash because they know they may want to come back at some time. So even they don’t think Amazon is as bad as some try to make it out to be …
for many of the more experienced people, $5k is a couple weeks worth of pay.
Even for the junior people, it’s not much pay (a month’s worth, less than two in any case)
That’s not much money to make it worth quitting a job with no chance of going back if other things don’t work out.
Agreed, you’d only take it if you knew you never ever wanted to work there again – which seems to run foul of some of the stories certain ADS types like to keep running about how ‘bad’ it is to work at Amazon.
That the case for zillions of employee at zillions of companies.