Corporate employees of Amazon were asked on Monday to volunteer their time to the company’s warehouses to assist with grocery delivery as it heads into its annual discount spree known as Prime Day.

In a Slack message reviewed by the Guardian that went to thousands of white-collar workers in the New York City area from engineers to marketers, an Amazon area manager called for corporate “volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet”. It is not clear how many took up the offer.

  • flandish@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    salaried emps don’t have “shifts”. the safe thing is to assume amazon is doing the profitable thing and that means exploitation.

    • vortic@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      I highly doubt that Amazon is dumb enough to ask people to volunteer their time for free. There are way tooany ways that ends in lawsuits. HR and the lawyers would put a stop to that faster than you can say “wage theft”.

      I’ve worked jobs where, at times of peak business, office staff were asked to volunteer for paid shifts rather than hire more people for a very short time. It’s not weird or malicious, it’s fairly normal.

      “Volunteer” doesn’t always imply “work for free”.

      • flandish@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        when a multi-billion dollar corp asks for volunteers you’d better believe it’s because it benefits the corp. the owners of amazon are trash.

      • bnrnrtbgd@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        I’ve worked jobs where, at times of peak business, office staff were asked to volunteer for paid shifts

        You’ve worked some shit jobs.

      • sprite0@sh.itjust.works
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        9 hours ago

        you don’t understand how exempt salaried employment works in the US.

        Exempt employees are are not entitled to overtime pay or minimum wage protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is supposed to be limited to those who work in professional, administrative, executive, outside sales, or computer-related roles.

        Asking a salaried employee to do something like this as a one off isn’t going to revoke their exempt status.

        https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime