How remote work connects workers who earn $19 an hour and $80,000 a year

Eric Deshawn Lerma felt waves of dread as he sat down to count the new costs in his routine since Amazon’s return to the office this spring. There is parking. There is fuel. There’s lunch. They add up to an extra $200 a month minimum, all in support of a policy he doesn’t quite understand the justification for – after three years of him and his teammates working from home.

But when Mr Lerma learned that some of his colleagues were organizing a strike to protest against the return policy, which requires workers to come in at least three days a week, he was initially hesitant about taking part. After all, he realizes that thousands of Amazon employees don’t have the flexibility to work from home. Their work requires them to go to warehouses every day to perform physically demanding labour.

“It really gave me a sense of internal conflict about whether working from home is a luxury or a right,” said Mr. Lerma, 27, who is an executive assistant in Seattle and joins the company, where he feels personally grown and professional, in 2022. “There are various rights and provisions associated with my role.”

In the end, however, he decided that he would probably participate virtually. “Even though warehouse workers have much harsher working conditions than I do,” he said, “I should still be able to reserve the right to protect my autonomy as an employee.”

Thousands of company employees, across industries, who remain adamant that they don’t want to go back to the office, now face a tension: How do their demands compare to those of the millions of employees whose jobs never gave them the convenience of remote working? Allowed ? And can a corporate employee’s advocacy benefit employees, including those seeking to join a union, outside the corporate sphere?

This tension follows a pandemic that exacerbated the divide between white-collar workers who were able to do their jobs from the safety of their homes and workers who often couldn’t and were exposed to higher Covid risks.

At the same time, workers in both the corporate and non-corporate spheres have been re-evaluating their working conditions, quitting their jobs in waves and calling for higher wages amid a tight labor market once dubbed a “labourer’s economy.” The unemployment rate has remained low this spring at 3.4 percent, while wages are rising.

At Amazon, hundreds of the company’s employees plan to take an hour off from work at lunchtime on Wednesday in protest of the company’s return-to-office rule, including layoffs and the company’s impact on the economy. climate. Weeks earlier, employees expressed their frustrations with the RTO policy in a Remote Advocacy channel, with more than 30,000 members, on Slack’s workplace messaging system.

The company has more than 350,000 business and technical employees worldwide. More than 800 in Seattle and 1,600 worldwide have pledged to join the strike. Some employees, particularly working parents, attribute some of their frustration to the financial toll of returning to the office, especially the cost and pressure of childcare.

The vast majority of Amazon’s more than one million employees, including those who have formed a union at a Staten Island warehouse, have worked in person during the pandemic.

Apple where employees spent open letters protesting personal work, and at the Gap have experienced similar dynamics. At Starbucks, more than 70 named employees, along with others who remained anonymous, have a petition this year urging the company to allow them to continue working remotely. Union members representing Starbucks baristas have supported these company employees, even though most of the company’s roughly 250,000 U.S. employees, including those in more than 300 union stores, cannot work from home.

Indeed, many warehouse and retail workers have been quick to show their support for their colleagues in the company, noting that they have nothing to do with office workers missing out on the agility the pandemic has proven.

“The work we do is in two different areas,” says Anna Ortega, 23, who works with Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, a group of warehouse workers, and has worked at an Amazon facility in San Bernardino, California. ., almost two years. “It just shows us that Amazon has a problem with employees and listening to us.”

Ms. Ortega spends her days lifting 50-pound packages—a task she could never do from home. But she said she supported Amazon workers asking for the flexibility to continue working remotely.

“If your employees are happy and can work productively from home, I think they can get better results,” Ms. Ortega said.

An Amazon spokesperson, Brad Glasser, said the company respected “the right of employees to express their opinions and come together peacefully” but that it had felt “good energy” since more employees returned to the office.

At Starbucks, union members representing store employees have corresponded with company employees on Discord and other platforms to offer their support. And when company employees launched their petition, they asked the company to both reverse the return policy and allow free and fair union elections in all stores.

Jake Sklaarw, 34, a software engineer at Starbucks who signed the petition, was frustrated with the return policy because he bought a house in an affordable neighborhood 30 miles from the office during the pandemic, thinking he could keep his distance to work. Earlier in his career, when he worked in restaurants, he commuted as much as three hours a day, and he sees his current calls for fairer company policies related to the struggles of baristas demanding respect in the workplace.

“The people who work in stores, when you talk to them, they don’t ask that other people have to work in person,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t make sense for Starbucks to stop remote work for some just because it doesn’t everyone can do it. “It kind of feels like an eye-for-an-eye situation to me: you’re not helping anyone — you’re just hurting everyone.”

Starbucks has suggested that its policy, which requires its 3,750 company employees to come to work three days a week, contains an element of fairness to its employees, or “partners,” because “many partners were not privileged to work remotely “. But some union members have rejected this logic.

For Sarah Pappin, 32, a shift supervisor at Starbucks in Seattle, what the company’s employees are asking for is directly related to what the store employees are demanding, such as increased Covid safety protection.

“Even jobs that you might consider dream jobs can be exploited,” she said. “I think there is a growing awareness that we are all workers.”

But that sense of solidarity doesn’t take away the guilt some office workers feel when they ask to hold onto the freedom of a workday in their living room. Many office workers have also seen all the benefits they have even in their organizational endeavors.

“We are so much closer to leadership,” said Mr. Lerma. “I have access to a work-issued laptop that has given me the entire address book of everyone at Amazon. I have access to Slack, which allows me to get any contact I want. A warehouse employee does not have that luxury.”