Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says company could treat workers better

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on Tuesday the company could do more to treat employees better and acknowledged that one of its approaches to worker safety during the coronavirus pandemic had failed.

“I think if you have a big group of people like us – we have 1.2 million employees – it’s almost like a small country,” Jassy said onstage at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle. “There are a lot of things you could do better.”

When asked what Amazon could do best, Jassy pointed to the company’s processes regarding pandemic leave in its warehouses. Amazon told workers it would offer up to two weeks of paid sick leave to employees who showed symptoms, had the virus or were in quarantine.

But this process did not work perfectly. Amazon employees told CNBC last April that they encountered problems getting paid while on leave. Additionally, the company’s highly automated human resources systems have become so overloaded with workers requesting Covid-19 leave that some employees have been mistakenly denied sick leave or threatened with dismissal, Bloomberg reported.

“During the pandemic in our distribution centers, we had a system and a process for people to request short and long term leave and the process just hasn’t evolved,” Jassy said. “We never planned to have a pandemic or to have such a demand. It didn’t work out the way we wanted it to.”

Amazon and other e-commerce companies have benefited from the surge in online orders fueled by the coronavirus. But the pandemic also placed unprecedented pressure on Amazon’s fulfillment and logistics operations and tested the company’s relationships with its frontline employees, who could not work remotely. Amazon revealed last October that nearly 20,000 frontline workers contracted Covid-19 between March 1, 2020 and September 19, 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a growing push among warehouses and delivery people across Amazon to advocate for better working conditions, leading to protests and attempts to organize. In the months leading up to his resignation as CEO, Amazon Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos laid out a vision for making the company “Earth’s Best Employer” and pledged to do better. treat workers.

“We don’t pretend to be perfect,” Jassy said. “Sometimes I think there are exaggerations and anecdotal references that don’t reflect the whole picture. But there are a lot of things that we can continue to work on and that we will be working on.”

Jassy also said he wanted to reshape Amazon’s relationship with the city of Seattle, where the company’s headquarters are located. Seattle lawmakers sparked animosity towards Amazon in 2018 when they passed a so-called “head tax,” which aimed to levy higher taxes on large businesses. Lawmakers ultimately scuttled the tax, but it did little to fix the city’s relationship with Amazon.

“I think our relationship with Seattle has really had its ups and downs. I think the first 20 years in the business have been pretty collaborative,” Jassy said. “I would say over the past five years, as you know, city council has become less in love with business or Amazon, it’s just harder.”

In recent years, Amazon has increased its presence outside of Seattle. He deployed staff to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue and rented office space at Microsoft’s longtime home in Redmond, Washington.

“We don’t think HQ1 is Seattle anymore. We really think it’s Puget Sound,” Jassy said. “We have a lot of people in Seattle, but we also have a lot of people in Bellevue and that’s where most of our growth will end up happening.”

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