Three takeaways from Amazon’s CEO at Code Conference

Earlier this week, Andy Jassy, e-commerce giant Amazon’s CEO and president (he took over from founder Jeff Bezos in the summer of 2021) sat down and spoke with Vox Media’s Kara Swisher at the publication’s 2022 Code Conference.

In the discussion, Swisher asked Jassy all about his views on the current and future world of work at Amazon. This ranged from remote vs office work, the future of hiring at Amazon and the unionization drive happening at Amazon stores in the US.

Here are three major takeaways from Jassy and Swisher’s conversation at Code Conference.

1. Amazon won’t mandate a return to office

Breaking the mold of its tech competitors Apple, Tesla and Google, Jassy was clear: “We don’t have a plan to require people to come back.”

“We don’t right now. But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”

He added that hybrid work is the norm at Amazon anyway – however, some teams come to the office more frequently than others. For instance, hardware and creative units tend to be in more often than the engineering team for example.

Jassy stated: “I do think there are some things that are harder to do remotely,” he said. “I think it’s a little harder to invent remotely.”

The Amazon CEO’s statements at Code Conference reiterate a memo he wrote to employees in October 2021. This laid out a relaxed and adaptable approach where leaders and managers would decide the working policies of their teams, rather than having a blanket policy.

2. Amazon slows down hiring

The conversation then turned to Amazon’s approach to hiring. Amid a looming recession, many companies, particularly in tech, have been forced to implement hiring freezes and layoffs.

Amazon recently shared in its earnings report in July that it had shed almost 100,000 workers between the first and second quarter – this is its largest sequential drop in its history.

This decline was not attributed to layoffs, but a slow down in hiring combined with Amazon’s high attrition rates, particularly among its warehouse and delivery staff.

At Code Conference, Jassy shared that after overexpansion to keep up with demand during the pandemic, Amazon will slow down its hiring, but not implement a freeze.

“I don’t think that you’ll see us hiring at the same rates that we did. But we’ll be hiring”, added Jassy.

3. Amazon ruled out pay rises for warehouse workers

Like Starbucks and other employers with high numbers of hourly, frontline workers, Amazon is facing a unionization drive at the moment, primarily among its warehouse workers.

In April workers in a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, were the first establish a union at Amazon, but the employer objected to the results, putting the company at loggerheads with the National Labor Relations Board.

Jassy told Code Conference there were “very disturbing irregularities” in the vote of workers. He added: “I think that’s going to take a long time to play out because I think it’s unlikely the NLRB is going to [rule] against themselves”.

He continued that Amazon workers are “better off in the structure they’re in right now”, where they get paid $18 an hour (more than double the US minimum wage) and get access to benefits like training and development.

However, when asked by Swisher if Amazon would continue raising wages to $25 an hour, Jassy reportedly scoffed and said: “There is a limit to the economics you can pay and have a business that can be profitable.”

Will Andy Jassy’s approach to the future of work at Amazon help the retail giant achieve it’s aim of being the world’s best employer? Only time will tell.

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