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A Bright Horizons childcare center on the Amazon headquarters campus in the Denny Triangle neighborhood of Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Amazon’s mandate to bring corporate and tech employees back to the office five days per week is being met with frustration from some working parents who valued the flexibility and cost savings they grew used to during years of remote and hybrid work.
The new work policy, which went into effect last week, has angered some employees to the point that they are actively looking to leave the company.
“I know parents raised kids before the pandemic and had to figure it out,” said one mother who has worked at Amazon for eight years. But with a husband who is also at Amazon, and two toddlers under age 4, she said a generation of parents “are being forced to give up the only reality they’ve ever known.”
The parents we spoke with all fear a significant loss of flexibility — they want to be able to run kids to doctor appointments or easily grab them from daycare if they fall ill; they dread a loss of morning and evening time with families due to returning to commuting; they say their expenses will also rise with five days in office.
Another mother who has worked at Amazon for four years fears that running to a kid-related appointment during the day will land a target on her back “because there’s going to be six other Amazonians that are younger or that don’t have kids.”
All of the employees we spoke with requested anonymity to protect themselves from any negative repercussions from speaking out.
In a statement to GeekWire, Amazon stressed that it recognizes there will occasionally be days when someone might need the flexibility to work from home for the day. The company said that for those occasions, “employees should communicate with their manager — just as they would have prior to the pandemic.”
These parents aren’t alone in their criticism of Amazon’s new policy, which follows a three-days-per-week in-office mandate in 2023.
An overwhelming majority of Amazon employees were not happy about the five-day policy, according to a survey from Blind, the forum for anonymous/verified workers. (The nature of such an unscientific survey is likely to mainly draw responses from individuals who are upset about the issue.)
Amazon is an outlier among U.S. corporations. Most companies have settled into hybrid policies that allow some remote work, according to Gallup. A handful of other large Seattle-area employers such as Starbucks have recently started enforcing strict return-to-office policies.
Amazon employs 50,000 corporate and tech workers in Seattle at its headquarters campus. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the decision to bring employees back to in-person work five days per week, he said the company was “going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID.”
But some parents see it differently.
“This is not a return to normal,” said the mother who is an eight-year Amazon vet. “This is a mandate to upend the care and systems we’ve built to raise our young children, when parents need flexibility and support the most.”
Raman Morris, a former Amazon employee who is launching a new preschool and childcare center in Seattle, believes that tech workers who became parents during the pandemic and got used to working from home may be hesitant about putting their kids in daycare.
“People that have grown up working hybrid and remote, and are parents now — they just have a very different bar than some of us from the previous generation of parents,” Morris said.
Bright Horizons, which operates childcare centers across the U.S., including on Amazon’s campus in Seattle and elsewhere in the region, said it is seeing an increase in interest when we contacted the company about impact from the new five-day policy.
Other daycare center leaders we spoke with said they didn’t notice significant new inquiries from Amazon parents.
Return-to-office mandates were among the issues that drew Amazon employees to a walkout protest at the company’s Seattle headquarters in May 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Parents in the Seattle region have long struggled to find adequate and affordable childcare. The broader childcare industry was hit hard by the pandemic, as many providers shut down or struggled to find staffers.
Meanwhile, childcare is getting more expensive, making it more difficult for families with tighter budgets to afford care.
The mother who has been at Amazon four years, and whose husband also works at the company, said they pay $7,000 a month for two young children to go to a Bright Horizons facility in Seattle five days a week.
The return of the Amazon workforce will further illustrate a “haves and the have-nots” situation, said Susan Brown, founder and CEO of Kids Co., a 35-year-old nonprofit which operates 11 child care facilities throughout Seattle.
“People with higher incomes will have a greater opportunity because they have more options for childcare support,” said Brown, who is also president of the Seattle Child Care Business Coalition and a board member of the Washington Childcare Centers’ Association.
She said she didn’t want to sound unsympathetic to parents who got used to remote work only to have it snatched away, but she called that ability to work from home a “position of privilege” that many in the workforce do not have, and did not have even during the pandemic.
Some parents we spoke with said their frustration goes beyond the specific mandates or days required in the office.
“It’s the trust that employees get from their employer,” said one of the moms, who is looking for a new job and who added that leaving the company is a frequent topic of conversation among people she knows at Amazon, where she said “morale is terrible.”
Another parent — a father of two kids who has been at Amazon more than four years — referenced the Amazon leadership principle in which the company strives to be “Earth’s best employer.” That can mean different things to different workers, he said.
“I think some people value flexibility, and their best employer is going to give them that flexibility,” he said. “And it kind of feels like the message from leadership has been, ‘Well, if that’s something you value, then value it elsewhere.’”
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