The billionaire’s warehouse workers were once left without medical leave wages, but he seemingly wasn’t fussed
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wasn’t in one employee’s good books before he departed the company as CEO in 2021.
The 61-year-old made a stunning impression on warehouse worker Tara Jones after she filed a direct complaint to him via email five years ago.
Hailing from Oklahoma, Tara issued the main man a personal message after realising she’d been underpaid by $90 (£71.30) while on medical leave.
What happened next with Bezos has to be read to be believed.
In the email obtained by The New York Times, Tara wrote to Bezos in 2020: “I’m behind on bills, all because the pay team messed up. I’m crying as I write this email.”
Left out in the cold, the Amazon staff member kickstarted an investigation by the publication after it was discovered that she wasn’t the only employee suffering the same treatment.
It was found that 179 fellow warehouse operatives were in similarly frustrating circumstances, with their doctors’ notes apparently ‘vanishing’ from the system over a period of 18 months.
Some revealed they were even dismissed from Amazon after its administrative software reported medical leave as absences.
In the aftermath, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told The Independent: “We’re disappointed when any of our employees experience an issue with their leave.
“The New York Times article suggested these issues are widespread and ongoing. They are not.
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“We went back and audited the period in question to make sure employees received their pay, and to our knowledge, there are no outstanding issues.
“The controls we’ve implemented over the last 18 months have resulted in less than 1 percent of people experiencing an issue while being on paid leave. Certainly, the unprecedented nature of Covid did put a strain on our system’s ability to keep pace with demand and we’ve been hard at work investing and inventing to do better every day.”
Although he could do with sharpening his email skills, Bezos hasn’t been afraid to test his trillion-dollar baby’s customer service system.
In one ‘uncomfortable’ stunt he pulled during the early days of Amazon, the businessman phoned its customer service line after data showed users were waiting just 60 seconds before being connected.
“I have a saying which is: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right,” Bezos told the Lex Fridman Podcast.
“It doesn’t mean you just slavishly follow the anecdotes then, it means you go examine the data. It’s usually not that the data is being mis-collected, it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.”
In the end, Bezos was on hold for 10 minutes during his experiment.
“It dramatically made my point that something was wrong with the data collection. That set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. That is an example of truth telling.
“That is an uncomfortable thing to do but you have to seek the truth even when it is uncomfortable,” he said.
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