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I was blown away by this article yesterday.  The more I thought about it
the more Amazon sounded like where academia is going.

Brian

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high
> ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father,
> who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and
> weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a
> less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a
> problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him
> and never returned to Amazon.
>
> “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they
> see it as a major weakness,” she said.
>
> A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after
> she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while
> she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee
> who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had
> surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she
> said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a
> family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
>
> A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a
> “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of
> being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had
> interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others
> from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been
> judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
>
> A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman
> who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another
> who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans,
> accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What
> kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her
> bosses.
>
> The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just
> experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled
> via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make
> sure my focus stayed on my job.”
>
>
> full:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html
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-- 
Brian McKenna, Ph.D.
Department of Behavioral Sciences
CASL 4025
Dearborn, Michigan
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