Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Yes, he's eating a cockroach here.
A much-discussed
New York Times story this week revealed that Amazon doesn't just treat its warehouse workers terribly. Its professional staff also face a
horrifying workplace culture:
A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals.
According to Jeff Bezos, "I don’t recognize this Amazon," but The Onion
offered Bezos a more plausible script. Here's the thing, though: Even if you take out the horrible stories about people being penalized for having cancer or losing a loved one, Amazon's workplace practices are still terrible. Terrible for workers, and not great for productivity. The ethos of working super long hours and being available even when you're on vacation is widespread among American corporations ... but we know it's a bad idea. The Harvard Business Review's Sarah Green Carmichael
reviews the research:
In a study of consultants by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, managers could not tell the difference between employees who actually worked 80 hours a week and those who just pretended to. While managers did penalize employees who were transparent about working less, Reid was not able to find any evidence that those employees actually accomplished less, or any sign that the overworking employees accomplished more.
Considerable evidence shows that overwork is not just neutral — it hurts us and the companies we work for. Numerous studies by Marianna Virtanen of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and her colleagues (as well as other studies) have found that overwork and the resulting stress can lead to all sorts of health problems, including impaired sleep, depression, heavy drinking, diabetes, impaired memory, and heart disease. Of course, those are bad on their own. But they’re also terrible for a company’s bottom line, showing up as absenteeism, turnover, and rising health insurance costs. Even the Scroogiest of employers, who cared nothing for his employees’ well-being, should find strong evidence here that there are real, balance-sheet costs incurred when employees log crazy hours.
If your job relies on interpersonal communication, making judgment calls, reading other people’s faces, or managing your own emotional reactions — pretty much all things that the modern office requires — I have more bad news. Researchers have found that overwork (and its accompanying stress and exhaustion) can make all of these things more difficult.
But too many companies prefer the illusion of added productivity through overwork to the reality of similar productivity from healthy employees with lives, and, thanks to decades of corporate attacks on unions and worker power, American workers rarely have the leverage to push back.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
Education
- Holyoke, Massachusetts, teacher and union leader Gus Morales spoke out, then lost his job, then got his job back after the state found probable cause that his firing was retaliatory. Then he lost his job again. And now the state has again found probable cause that Morales was fired because of his union activity.
- Don't do this:
Equip for Equality reviewed 40 charter school operators in Chicago and found that two had recently asked applicants about student disability or special education status, and six had asked questions about what language the student or parent spoke.
The nonprofit says it’s “inappropriate” for these schools to ask during the application process for personal information such as special education or disability status, medical needs, language proficiency, country of origin, criminal records, grades or family income.
- What happened to New Orleans' veteran black teachers?
When Hurricane Katrina hit, the city had 4,600 teachers—nearly 60 percent of them black women. Overall, 71 percent of the city’s teaching corps at the time was black, according to data from Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance. But those numbers have plummeted since the storm. Now, 45 percent of the city’s 1,300 public school teachers are white, and about 49 percent are black, per the ERA.
Black children, however, represent almost 90 percent of the city’s public school system enrollment, with white students mostly clustered at a handful of high-performing schools.
