This is Why Jeff Bezos is Being Slammed for his Final Letter to Shareholders

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is stepping down from his position and in his last letter to shareholders, he has emphasized that the company needs to do a better job for its employees.

Before passing on the torch to AWS CEO Andy Jassy in the third quarter, Bezos issued a final letter on Thursday and wrote, “It’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees.”

The CEO touched on the recent union election outcome at one of Amazon’s Alabama warehouses as an example of why the company needs to address challenges within its workforce.

It was earlier this month that Amazon secured enough votes to defeat a historic unionization drive at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse. This would have represented the first union at a U.S. Amazon facility.

“While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success,” Bezos wrote.

In a statement, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which led the campaign in Alabama, said, “Bezos’s admission today demonstrates that what we have been saying about workplace conditions is correct. But his admission won’t change anything, workers need a union – not just another Amazon public relations effort in damage control.”

“We cannot just allow him to get away with empty words,” Appelbaum told Yahoo Finance. “Where they say nice words, what we really need are nice actions.”

“I certainly hope that what Bezos says is not just another PR effort at damage control,” he adds. “We’ve seen too many examples about how Amazon has been more concerned with dealing with public relations damage than dealing with the underlying problem.”

“Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success,” Bezos wrote on in his letter. “We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”

Bezos denied that Amazon has cultivated a brutal workplace culture in its warehouses and wrote, “Our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. That’s not accurate,” he said.

Bezos will continue on with Amazon as executive chairman and says he plans to focus on how to make Amazon’s warehouses safer. Roughly 40%
of work-related injuries are sprains or strains mostly due to repeating the same motions and are common among new employees accoding to the CEO.

The company is now developing automated staffing schedules that rotate employees through different jobs that use other muscle-tendon groups and will begin deploying the technology later this year.

“If any shareowners are concerned that Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work might dilute our focus on Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, let me set your mind at ease,” Bezos said. “Think of it this way. If we can operate two businesses as different as consumer ecommerce and AWS, and do both at the highest level, we can certainly do the same with these two vision statements. In fact, I’m confident they will reinforce each other.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.