LONDON: Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy recently told employees that a new plan requiring them to be in the office five days a week did not amount to a “backdoor layoff”.
Yet his reported comments at a company-wide meeting last week did not rebut a previous suggestion from a senior manager that staff who fail to comply could look for work elsewhere.
As companies try to rein in costs and restrict workplace initiatives that do not help profits, workers are wary of falling victim to a fresh horror: The stealth sacking.
Alongside a string of recent publicly announced mass layoffs – by companies including Nissan, Boeing and Citigroup – there have been a series of employers quietly justifying smaller-scale dismissals because of seemingly minor violations of company policy.
Here the focus is not on the size and scope of redundancy programmes, how humanely managers handled them or whether support or severance pay was offered to affected staff, but on the specific rationale behind the decisions.
Facebook owner Meta, for example, sacked about two dozen staff for abusing meal credit vouchers, while EY terminated the employment of a group of workers for watching multiple training videos at once, the Financial Times has reported.
Infractions that workers have probably interpreted as minor misdemeanours in the past can now be sackable offences, and may prompt questions about whether cost savings are being disguised.
“As with most stories, there are two sides,” says Leo Martin, managing director of GoodCorporation, a business ethics consultancy that helps organisations design, build and improve their ethics and compliance programmes.
“From the employee perspective they may have been given unrealistic deadlines, excessive work pressures or have received unclear guidance as to what is expected, while the employer will feel that abusing a perk or taking short-cuts undermines their systems, [and that] cheating in an exam or lying about training … is a fundamental breach of trust.”
Part of the motivation to take a tough line on employees could be to make an example of anyone deemed to be a rule-breaker.
This level of corporate discipline has been more common among heavily regulated industries, such as banking and financial services, that have huge compliance functions and the risk of hefty penalties for any conduct breaches.
Amanda Rajkumar, who has held senior human-resources (HR) leadership roles at JPMorgan Chase and BNP Paribas, says: “Banks and financial services have always come down hard … given the robust regulatory environment and strong requirement to demonstrate exemplary, ethical behaviour related to the fiduciary nature of the industry.”
