New Delhi: After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, it is time for the e-commerce giant’s own PR chief to paint the other side of the story about the alleged ‘brutal’ work environment the company has been recently accused of.
In a summer report by the New York Times, some of the former and current Amazonians revealed horrifying accounts of the unhealthy culture Amazon has.
From mistreating an employee diagnosed with cancer, to not having enough toilets to accommodate the male-dominant workforce, the e-commerce giant has been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.
After CEO Jeff Bezos trashed the reports of Amazon being a ‘bruising workplace,’ and a new daily feedback system being rolled out to white collar employees, it is time for the company’s PR chief who has taken the task upon himself to paint a different picture, one that tells “What The New York Times didn’t tell you.”
In his Medium post, Jay Carney, Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon, refuted the claims made by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld in their NYT piece titled, ‘Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.’
Carney not only highlights the actual context of the accounts given by ex-employees but also questions the reporters’ journalistic ethics and standards for publishing a biased story when what they had agreed to publish was a rather balanced story, leaving out the negative anecdotes.
One of the ex-employees, Bo Olson, had said, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” an infamous phrase that said it all about Amazon’s culture. However, Carney says that what the NYT piece did not reveal was that Olson’s brief tenure had ended after an investigation revealed that he had attempted to defraud vendors – a charge he admitted to and resigned immediately. He further goes on to highlight other such contexts, refuting the claims made in the NYT piece.
Soon after Carney’s blistering response, The New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet also posted a detailed response of his own, defending the report. He stresses that the reporters talked to more than 100 Amazon employees and the accounts they provided did have recurring pattern of Amazon being a troubling workplace.
It is not only the employees who feel this way, Baquet argues, even outsiders who interact with Amazon employees like recruiters, tech firms, employment lawyers, etc. also said that their experiences were similar to those mentioned in the story.
Carney has posted another response to Baquet declaring, “The bottom line is the New York Times chose not to fact-check or vet its most important on-the-record sources, despite working on the story for six months.”
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