this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Sounds like the solution is to say, "Yes," then never show up onsite. Make them fire you, so you're entitled to unemployment benefits and any severance.
You don't even have to say yes. Just refuse to relocate it, and when they say you have to resign, just don't.
But if 50% resign because they think they have to, that's 50% less unemployment Amazon has to pay
No. The solution is to call their bullshitnout.
A company can’t hire you to work from one location (regardless if it’s WFH or not,) and then unilaterally decide to have you relocate.
“You can apply internally” or anything else that is a new contract doesn’t matter. They’re changing the terms of employment, and they can’t do that unilaterally.
The choices are to agree with their new terms, accept the “out” of taking another position in your area, or reject them. They can use what ever semantics they want, but it’s still a layoff.
In the ~~use~~ US, with at-will employment, they absolutely can. Terminating someone for not relocating is absolutely legal. And, barring contract or law to the contrary, severance is not required.
This state of things are what happens when you remove unions from the workforce, and why companies like Amazon absolutely flip their shit when union talk starts.
Well, yes. But then they trigger unemployment. The can’t here is that they’re trying to avoid that.
In the us, you have to pay unemployment if they’re not terminated for cause. And refusing to locate is not an “acceptable” cause, so it comes to be an at-will termination (ie “we’re firing you because we can.”)
Also, the jobs they’re talking about usually come with severance packages. It’s not the warehouse gig workers
This is true.
Qualifying for Unemployment Insurance benefits is a decision made by the State, not the employer, and the standard for qualification is much lower than the one used to determine if terminating an employee is legal or not. That is, there are many things that will get you UI benefits that are still perfectly legal reasons to fire someone, as you said.
As an aside, UI is an insurance product sold (forcibly, by the State) to the employer. The employer pays a premium which rises or falls based on the number and cost of claims that employer generates. Naturally, employers are incentivized to reduce the number of claims to keep costs low, but it's not, as is commonly thought, the employer paying benefits directly.
As another side, a strategy companies are using lately to keep their UI costs low is providing a severance package that pays all or part of the employee's salary but paying it out over time. Depending on the state and the rules for that state's UI program, that often counts against any UI benefit the former employee would receive, reducing the weekly benefit (sometimes to $0). It's a thing I've only seen in the past 5 or so years. I would expect States to start to recognize this end-run around the system and adjust the rules accordingly in the near future.
this is an old strategy. It's called "severance." Many company will offer a severance package before going to lay offs that enhance retirement packages (especially for people close enough to it anyhow) or otherwise entice people to take it, instead.
It would really, really, suck if you had to rely on a former employer to pay unemployment. Just saying.
Did you not see the end of their post?
Yes. "Layoff" has a very specific meaning in employment. In the US, it is, in one form or another, ending the employment agreement because there is no longer available work. I.e., "Your position has been eliminated."
That's not the case in the "Everyone has to relocate to (place)" situation. It is not a layoff if you fail to comply. It is the company terminating your employment because you refuse to perform the job they want you to do.
I feel like everyone understands that the question of "have you been fired" shouldn't include instances of "I refused to relocate" though.
It's a constructive dismissal where I live, unless your employment contract specifies you must work in the office. If it doesn't and you applied for and accepted a remote job, then you're pretty much golden.
I'm not in USA though FWIW.
IIRC it is where I live (in the US) as well.
Constructive dismissal isn't the same thing as being fired for cause, regardless of whether Amazon tries to lie about it.
I think you're really blowing this out of proportion as if this is the scary "permanent record" teachers used to warn you about in elementary school.
Explaining that they needed you to relocate and you weren't willing is a satisfactoy answer. Additionally there's no requirement that you put Amazon on your resume if it did come down to that. Frankly I don't think the new employer would really care what happened between you and some other corporation if you seem competent and they aren't going to check every reference on every single person that applies to a corporation with 100k+ employees to stop you from getting an interview first.
At this point every hiring manager out there is aware of Amazon's terrible workplace practices. Put on the resume don't say you got fired. When you get asked why you left, tell the truth of the situation. Some managers won't want you because if it sure, but the intelligent ones can see the tree through the forest and those are the places you want to work anyway.
It's sub optimal but that's what happens when you join a place like Amazon.
You just say “no. And then explain the actual situation in the interview.
And no engineering job I’ve ever applied for has had me fill out an “application”. That’s not a thing. And if some place weirdly has it, then send your resume somewhere else.
Exactly this. theres no reason to shoot yourself in the foot for something you had no control over
From first hand experience I can say I never submitted an application to work at one of these places. The hiring process was me submitting my resume, doing phone interviews, and then in-person interviews.
I didn't need to submit a CV when I submitted a resume, and my work eligibility was verified when I filled out an I-9 form after getting the job. Furthermore, in the context of the discussion, what does asking about citizenship or demographics reveal about whether you've been fired from Amazon?
You can be condescending and speculate all you like, but I've actually gone through this process and it isn't as you describe it to be.
I like how you keep insisting that you know more about my hiring process than I do even though you know absolutely nothing about me, where i work, or what was involved. You can keep shifting the goal posts with each new comment, but you're still totally off base and entirely too confident, to almost an absurdist degree, in your assumptions.
Nobody has said anything about "strategic hires" other than you, so spare me your irrelevant rant about these 'entitled employees' that you've entirely invented in your head.
Nobody is going to care that you wouldn't relocate for your job and they will never check this reference until after you've already been interviewed and had a chance to explain.
You mean you've never filled out one of those web forms asking like how many years of experience you have with X technology, what is your expected salary, when is your earliest start date, etc? When job hunting earlier this year I've found those to be incredibly common.
Have you ever been fired?
Lie. They lie to you, you lie to them. They're not the government. The worst they can do is fire you if they ever found out, which they won't.
That's job abandonment and would disqualify from unemployment benefits.