Working as a Contract Employee for Amazon

The contract obtained by promoting and accepting a seasonal Amazon inventory position even includes a provision requiring employees who sign it to „disclose and provide a true and accurate copy of this agreement to any potential new employer … BEFORE accepting a job[…] „During employment and for 18 months after the date of termination of employment, the employee will not participate, directly or indirectly, on his or her own behalf or on behalf of any other business (e.g.B. as an employee, agent, partner or consultant), will not participate in or support the development, manufacture, marketing or sale of products or services that compete with or compete with any product or service sold. To have to. offered or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intends to be sold, offered or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) on which the employee has worked or supported, or on which the employee has received or received confidential information. In my last month, it was difficult to take care of it. I did a high quality job. I was one of the few employees who didn`t have to review their work before putting it online, but like the rest of the team, I had lost my enthusiasm for the project. Having just completed my maximum of eleven months of contract work that Amazon allows, I thought I`d share my thoughts on your practice of hiring a staff made up of temporary workers. While it may seem like the company is saving money — because you don`t have to provide medical care or paid vacation to temporary workers — the revolving door of new employees encourages inferior work, inconsistent productivity, and wastes useful training resources.

But Garden, a law professor at Seattle University, notes that such a contract, which is legally enforceable, may actually be completely irrelevant in a low-wage job. „One way to look at this is a kind of malicious approach to getting workers to sign a contract that is most likely unenforceable,” Garden says. „Knowing that people who worked for $10 and $11 an hour won`t be able to hire a lawyer to fight for them later. While companies can impose non-compete clauses on low-wage workers to prevent trade secret leaks, there is also a more cynical explanation: simply depriving competitors of employees to hire, Lobel said. Non-compete obligations can also lower workers` wages. Traditionally, a key strategy to discourage employees from defecting to a competitor has simply been to offer competitive salaries, but a company that uses non-compete obligations may feel less pressure to pay well. The work is repetitive and physically demanding, and can pay several dollars above the minimum wage, but Amazon requires strict and far-reaching non-compete clauses from these workers — including seasonal ones. The Amazon deal that The Verge received requires employees to promise that after their brief stints at Amazon, they won`t work for a year and a half at a company where they „directly or indirectly” support a good or service that rivals those they`ve supported on Amazon.

Of course, the company`s warehouses are the beating heart of Amazon`s online shopping empire, whose extraordinary scale has earned it the title of „Everything Store,” so Amazon requires temporary workers to abandon a significant portion of the global economy in exchange for a months-long hourly warehouse appearance. Related article: Amazon reaches 97,000 employees, more than tripled in three years Lee wants to continue her seasonal work at Amazon, and because of the non-compete clause she signed, she would be cautious if she applied for a second job at Amazon`s competitor like Sam`s Club, Walmart`s wholesale subsidiary. Lee says that in this hypothetical scenario, she would be clear with Sam`s Club`s hiring agents about the non-compete clause she had signed on Amazon and would also contact Amazon to ask permission to work at Sam`s Club. It`s unclear whether Amazon has tried to enforce its non-compete rules with hourly warehouse workers, and Amazon did not respond when Asked by The Verge about it. But the company has a habit of aggressively pursuing such cases against employees. Last year, after a former Amazon marketing executive accepted a job at Google, Amazon filed a lawsuit against him to test the limits of the non-compete clause. The willingness of the courts to validate such agreements can vary considerably from one State to another. But no matter how willing the courts are to enforce them, non-compete clauses can still influence workers` behavior.

Courts are often reluctant to enforce non-compete rules that span the entire United States, let alone the entire world, according to Garden, who notes that the „reasonableness” standard is the most important legal test of agreements. .