Inside Amazon's Worst Human Resources Problem

A knot of problems with Amazon's system for handling paid and unpaid leaves has led to devastating consequences for workers. From a report: A year ago, Tara Jones, an Amazon warehouse worker in Oklahoma, cradled her newborn, glanced over her pay stub on her phone and noticed that she had been underpaid by a significant chunk: $90 out of $540. The mistake kept repeating even after she reported the issue. Ms. Jones, who had taken accounting classes at community college, grew so exasperated that she wrote an email to Jeff Bezos, the company's founder. "I'm behind on bills, all because the pay team messed up," she wrote weeks later. "I'm crying as I write this email." Unbeknown to Ms. Jones, her message to Mr. Bezos set off an internal investigation, and a discovery: Ms. Jones was far from alone. For at least a year and a half -- including during periods of record profit -- Amazon had been shortchanging new parents, patients dealing with medical crises and other vulnerable workers on leave, according to a confidential report on the findings. Some of the pay calculations at her facility had been wrong since it opened its doors over a year before. As many as 179 of the company's other warehouses had potentially been affected, too. Amazon is still identifying and repaying workers to this day, according to Kelly Nantel, a company spokeswoman. That error is only one strand in a longstanding knot of problems with Amazon's system for handling paid and unpaid leaves, according to dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Together, the records and interviews reveal that the issues have been more widespread -- affecting the company's blue-collar and white-collar workers -- and more harmful than previously known, amounting to what several company insiders described as one of its gravest human resources problems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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