A few people I grew up with are frequently the "best workers in the company" and are similarly fired suddenly after a few months. If you haven't seen the pattern you can be forgiven when you believe them the first time.
Not having to pay the $3000?
If the unemployment makes up for it, maybe they're banking on him being dumb or intimidated, or maybe they're just dumb themselves.
If such an incentive did exist I suspect we will hear a great deal more of these stories and won't have to rely on a second hand account retold anonymously.
That said, I'm surprised Amazon doesn't have a policy about avoiding firing around bonuses like this because it seems like such bad PR if a newspaper picks a story like this up and runs with it.
So, this kind of shit really does happen, at least to some of us. Some are smart enough to leave the sinking ship before it tanks their career.
Don’t get me wrong, Amazon or the manager might in the wrong here.
But when you only hear from one side, it reminds me of my coworker who complained of how poorly she was treated when she barely did any work and was eventually fired after a year.
Aside from the not-feel-good story, my god if there's a case for wanting to get all the stats when you attribute a cause to a problem, this illustrates it. (before you jump to the conclusion that Amazon does this out of spite or purposefully, which of course it might -- and unless you happen to get your kicks from overreacting to stories on the internet/Reddit)
With tens of thousands of workers recently hired, and probably a good number fired, I'm sure you will find a distribution of people who were fired 2, 3, 4, etc. any number of days before some noteworthy date in their pay schedule. This of course happens to be a case where it was dramatically close. Get enough people in a set and you will find all sorts of pleasant and unpleasant coincidences.
I'm guessing there could be 10x the number of people outraged if you made the criterion: fired 1 week before bonus. How about people who died a day before their birthday, or even minutes before? Cut a sample a certain way and you're sure to find the oddest case. How about the person who lucked out and got the bonus and quit the next day?
Now, as I said, maybe Amazon did it deliberately out of spite, to save $3000. Who knows. But I'm just saying it's not inconsistent with random HR behavior, and if you want to make a claim of deliberate malice with any responsibility you'd better study the matter more carefully than citing one example. I'm not jumping on the Reddit antiwork bandwagon just because of this stat.
Aside from that, what does this story incentivize Amazon to do? Pretty much fire someone earlier so that they won't be accused of stuff like this.
The real problem is a manager or leader doing this behavior out of spite, or a leader who really doesn’t understand the business doing it to naively prove his thriftiness to some other boneheaded leader in an act that ultimately has zero value to the company. So IMHO, blame the mid-level leadership, not the corporation.
As someone else said, $3000 isn't even a rounding error on the level of amazon. However, I wouldn't put it past middle management to do this. But that's hearsay given the info.
Either way I think HR dropped the ball here. Getting fired/laid off this close to a significant bonus is such an easy case with the Department of Labor. It honestly wastes more of Amazon's infinite funds than just accepting an invoice and giving the employee the bonus.
If this dude was an unsatisfactory employee and Amazon didn't tell them then that would be troubling. But they probably did, internet stories tend to filter out that sort of detail. There isn't enough here to get worked up about.
Sounds like a power trippy middle manager more than a corp “evil plan”.
Literally every signing bonus I've ever heard of is the same.
Using this for warehouse workers sounds like little more than a tool for recruiters to mislead people before they’ve read the terms of the contract.
Why not call it a “one year retention bonus”?
We also have another kind of bonus that's paid after a year and we don't call it a signing bonus.
* talking of white collar jobs I have seen
Firing each worker you get after a few months to back out of the bonus seems very unlikely to me, they would run out of people to hire very quickly. And imagining some middle manager doing this (i.e. not official policy) also doesn't make sense - it's not like they personally pay the bonus, what's their motivation?
It's more likely they gave the new hire the full length of time to prove themselves, and they decided they were inadequate for some reason that the story teller will of course never tell us.
Some red flags:
- A one-off save of $3000 makes absolutely no sense for a company of the size of Amazon. Where are all the other workers who got fired for the same reason?
- We only have one side of the story.
- The post does not go into any detail about the firing. It's the classic "he was a good boy" story which falls apart instantly once you see hard evidence.
- The subreddit is incredibly biased against work in general.
- The poster has not made any further comments after posting the thread, no clarifications, nothing - a likely karma-farming attempt.
This is almost certainly fake.
You sign onto a job with no promise of getting a bonus until you work, say, 90 days. What does it matter if you got fired 1 month before that date, versus 1 day? You feel it was almost yours, and it feels so much worse?
Aside from that, until workers refuse to sign up for a job that has a 1 month vesting period for the bonus, and instead they have to make it 1 week to find employees, or 1 day, what is there to object to? You agreed.
Of course, I am not known for my PR skills.
