Disney, often seen as the epitome of magic and happiness, is now facing a major dilemma. Thousands of employees are protesting the company’s new return-to-work policy, sending shockwaves through corporate America.
For some, work is part of life and tantamount to taking responsibility for one’s future – complaining about it does not garner any sympathy or help to solve the problem. While for Disney having their employees show up to work in offices is a critical step for a company who is losing billions of dollars per year.
The Post Millennial reports, more than 2,300 Disney employees signed a petition protesting the return-to-work rule, which ends the work-from-home policy that was implemented during Covid.
The petition from Disney employees said the mandate from CEO Bob Iger is “likely to have unintended consequences that cause long-term harm to the company.”
The petition added, “This policy will slow, or even reverse, our post-COVID recovery and growth by creating critical resource shortages and causing irreplaceable institutional knowledge loss.”
After a disappointing last quarter of Fiscal Year 2022, Disney announced on February 8 that it would lay off 7,000 employees and restructure. Disney employees across all of their brands, including Pixar, Marvel, and ABC, had been allowed to work in the office only two to three days a week. The change was announced by Iger in January, and some employees threatened to leave once it went into effect.
Another woke company Amazon is facing major challenges with its labor force also.
Daily wire reports. A recent announcement that Amazon employees must report to the office at least three times a week has furious Amazon employees threatening to quit and drafting petitions.
CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that teams tend to work through hard and complex trade-offs more quickly when physically located together. After the announcement, hundreds of Amazon employees joined an internal Slack channel called Remote Advocacy, which had more than 14,000 members as of Tuesday.
While Amazon employees are angry about a return to work order from the top brass at Amazon, downtown Seattle is excited for more business.
It seems that the age of the work-from-home economy is coming to an end. Major corporations like Disney and Amazon are putting pressure on their employees to return to the office, regardless of the Covid pandemic. This shift is causing major protests from workers who are used to the pampered lifestyle of working from home. The return to work policy is a shock to many employees who have become used to the flexibility and freedom of working from home. For some, this return to normalcy is a welcomed change. However, for others, it is a step backwards in terms of productivity and growth. The economy is still recovering from the effects of Covid, and many people are not ready to return to office life just yet. Only time will tell if these major corporations will succeed in their return-to-work policies, or if they will be forced to back down in the face of employee protests. But the fact remains that a huge swath of Americans never stopped going to work at physical locations, and apparently these pampered employees have no sympathy for us normal people.Â
Let’s continue this conversation, in the comments below.
