Jeff Bezos defends Amazon practices after NYT exposé

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has defended his company after allegations of employee cruelty made by the New York Times.

In a rare communication from the 51-year-old, Bezos told staff to carefully read the “very long” article and compared it with a “very different take by a current Amazonian” in an internal all-staff email.

Bezos said: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR.”

The company’s founder, who is worth $49.5bn, told staff that they could email him directly and that “even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero”.

Over 100 former and current Amazon employees were interviewed for the New York Times’s 5,400-word expose, describing working conditions devoid of empathy and which push employees to their limits in the name of productivity and efficiency.

Bo Olson, a former employee from the company's book marketing department, described Amazon as a place where "you walk out of a conference room and you'll see a grown man covering his face" and where "nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk".

“Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves,” said Noelle Barnes who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years.

The article paints a picture where every part of employees’ working and personal lives are tracked and quantified, where their movements, productivity and successes or failures are measured to the nth degree while managers are forced to rate their employees and fire their lowest-scoring workers.

Instant replies to emails are expected, even if sent in the middle of the night or the weekends, and employees are apparently actively encouraged to secretly funnel their back-stabbing or praise through Amazon’s “Anytime Feedback Tool”. Some employees felt it necessary to secretly form pacts of negative feedback to edge out others and prevent themselves from being fired, according to the article.

The interviews describe Amazon’s atmosphere as one that sees employees actively competing against each other, where the fully committed who are prepared to sacrifice to get ahead thrive and while others are stamped on.

“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Bezos said in a letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997.

Even the company’s guidelines “conjure an empire of elite workers” according to the article, which describes rules such as “hire and develop the best”, exhibit “ownership” over your patch of the business and conduct everything transparently to see “who is really achieving and who is not”.

Unlike other US technology firms, Amazon's competitive nature can see high-performing staff see significant bonuses, often in stock, but without the free food and other perks the likes of Google and Facebook offer.

Meanwhile the company embraces “frugality”, another one of its guidelines, often forcing workers to pay for their own travel expenses and mobile phones, while exerting extreme pressure that sees employees work day and night.

One woman interviewed said she had paid a freelancer in India to enter data out of her own pocket to get more done: "these businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful", she said.

“Hopefully, you’re having fun working with a bunch of brilliant teammates, helping invent the future, and laughing along the way,” wrote Bezos in his memo, who is infamous for his big, loud laugh which has been described as maniacal by some, grating by others.

The article illustrated the alleged poor welfare with anecdotes from employees. One female employee with breast cancer was allegedly put on a “performance improvement plan” while another was sent on a business trip the day after suffering a miscarriage. A thyroid cancer sufferer was also allegedly marked with low performance on returning to work and told that Amazon was more productive without her.

Bezos said: “[The article] claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard. I don’t recognise this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.”

“I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.”

A spokesperson for Amazon said: "While we generally do not comment on individual news stories, we quickly saw current Amazon employees react," referencing a blogpost by Amazon's head of infrastructure development, Nick Ciubotariu. (Guardian Service)