Amazon workers upset about recent layoffs, a return-to-office mandate and the company’s environmental impact are planning a walkout at the company's Seattle headquarters on Wednesday.
The lunchtime protest comes a week after Amazon's annual shareholder meeting and a month after a policy took effect requiring workers to return to the office three days per week.
“We respect our employees' rights to express their opinions,” the company said.
As of Tuesday night, more than 1,800 employees had pledged to walk out around the world, including about 870 in Seattle, according to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a climate change advocacy group founded by Amazon workers.
While some plan to gather at the Amazon Spheres – a four-storey structure in the centre of Seattle that from the outside looks like three connected glass orbs – others will participate remotely.
Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said there has been a good energy on the company’s South Lake Union campus and at its other urban centres since more employees returned to the office.
More than 20,000 workers, however, signed a petition urging Amazon to reconsider the return-to-office mandate.
“As it pertains to the specific topics this group of employees is raising, we’ve explained our thinking in different forums over the past few months and will continue to do so,” Mr Glasser said.
In a February memo, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said the company made its decision to return corporate employees to the office at least three days a week after observing what worked during the pandemic.
Among other things, he said senior leadership watched how staff performed and talked to leaders at other companies.
They concluded employees tended to be more engaged in person and collaborate more easily, he said.
In a note asking Amazon employees to pledge their participation in the walkout, organisers said Amazon “must return autonomy to its teams, who know their employees and customers best, to make the best decision on remote, in-person, or hybrid work, and to its employees to choose a team which enables them to work the way they work best”.
Some employees have also complained that Amazon has been slow to address its impact on climate change.
Amazon, which relies on fossil fuels to power the planes, lorries and vans that ship packages all over the world, has an enormous carbon footprint.
Staff have been vocal in criticising some of the company's practices.
In an annual statement to investors, Amazon said it aims to deploy 100,000 electric delivery vehicles by 2030 and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
But walkout organisers contend the company must do more and commit to zero emissions by 2030.
The walkout follows widespread cost-cutting at Amazon, where layoffs have affected workers in advertising, human resources, gaming, stores, devices and Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing division.
The company has cut 27,000 jobs since November.
Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet the demand from homebound Americans who were increasingly shopping online to keep themselves safe from the virus.
Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years.
But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic eased. The company began pausing or cancelling its warehouse expansion plans last year.
Amid growing anxiety over the potential for a recession, Amazon in the past few months shut down a subsidiary that's been selling fabrics for nearly 30 years, closed Amazon Care, its hybrid virtual, in-home care service, and Amazon Smile, a philanthropic programme.
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Manchester United 4
Young 13', Mata 28', Lukaku 42', Rashford 82'
Fulham 1
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Two stars
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
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With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
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Zakat definitions
Zakat: an Arabic word meaning ‘to cleanse’ or ‘purification’.
Nisab: the minimum amount that a Muslim must have before being obliged to pay zakat. Traditionally, the nisab threshold was 87.48 grams of gold, or 612.36 grams of silver. The monetary value of the nisab therefore varies by current prices and currencies.
Zakat Al Mal: the ‘cleansing’ of wealth, as one of the five pillars of Islam; a spiritual duty for all Muslims meeting the ‘nisab’ wealth criteria in a lunar year, to pay 2.5 per cent of their wealth in alms to the deserving and needy.
Zakat Al Fitr: a donation to charity given during Ramadan, before Eid Al Fitr, in the form of food. Every adult Muslim who possesses food in excess of the needs of themselves and their family must pay two qadahs (an old measure just over 2 kilograms) of flour, wheat, barley or rice from each person in a household, as a minimum.
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COMPANY PROFILE
Company name: Letstango.com
Started: June 2013
Founder: Alex Tchablakian
Based: Dubai
Industry: e-commerce
Initial investment: Dh10 million
Investors: Self-funded
Total customers: 300,000 unique customers every month
WHY%20AAYAN%20IS%20'PERFECT%20EXAMPLE'
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Dhadak 2
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Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching
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Tonight's Chat on The National
Tonight's Chat is a series of online conversations on The National. The series features a diverse range of celebrities, politicians and business leaders from around the Arab world.
Tonight’s Chat host Ricardo Karam is a renowned author and broadcaster who has previously interviewed Bill Gates, Carlos Ghosn, Andre Agassi and the late Zaha Hadid, among others.
Intellectually curious and thought-provoking, Tonight’s Chat moves the conversation forward.
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