Tuesday, Amazon employees continued to protest the recently announced return-to-office mandate by CEO Andy Jassy, including spamming an internal website with messages expressing their objection to the new policy.
Employee discontent with the mandate manifested itself on Inside Amazon, the e-commerce retailer's internal news stream for employees, where staff repeatedly remarked on a recording of Jassy's latest all hands meeting.
"By arbitrarily forcing return-to-office without providing data to support it and despite clear evidence that it is the wrong decision for employees, Amazon has failed its role as earth's best employer," according to screenshots viewed by CNBC. "I believe this decision will be detrimental to our business and is antithetical to how we make decisions at Amazon."
A group of tech employees launched a Slack channel and developed an internal petition to oppose the mandate, which compels them to return to the office at least three days per week beginning on May 1. The petition requests that Jassy and Amazon's S-team leadership withdraw the directive mere days after it was introduced.
Since then, the organization has gathered 16,000 members, and as of Tuesday night, approximately 5,000 employees have signed the petition.
According to an employee who requested anonymity, employees began writing these comments after Amazon blocked "liking" and commenting on Jassy's memo announcing the return-to-office order. Each comment includes the identification and position of the poster.
Employees who posted in the Slack channel expressed surprise at the announcement. To be within commuting distance of the office, a number of participants voiced annoyance that they would have to make plans for child care, elder care, or potentially relocate.
Before, Amazon allowed individual managers to determine how frequently their teams were obliged to report to the office. Jassy has likewise embraced remote and hybrid work, despite the fact that he acknowledged Amazon was in a "stage of experimenting, learning, and adjusting" and that the company's return-to-office policy may be modified.
Jassy realized last week that calling employees back to the workplace would present issues.
"We know that it won't be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work," Jassy wrote in a memo announcing the mandate.
Numerous staff members have "Remote Advocacy" as their Slack status to demonstrate their support for the petition.
