Amazon has long resisted pleas to provide a backup day care benefit for employees, even though other tech companies have offered the perk for years. Now a group comprising hundreds of working moms is waging a campaign to persuade founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos that providing help for parents dealing with flu outbreaks, school closures and other emergencies is not simply humane but good for the company, too.
The group has been collecting anecdotal evidence to show how a lack of day care support can derail the careers of talented women who otherwise might be promoted to more senior jobs, according to an email reviewed by Bloomberg. Among the accounts: an Amazon.com Inc. manager tired of seeing colleagues quit because they can’t find childcare in one of the country’s fastest-growing cities and a recruiter frustrated when top talent leaves for companies that offer working parents more support.
The women, who belong to a group of more than 1,800 employees called the Momazonians, are scheduled to meet with senior managers in coming weeks to make their case. They want the company to provide backup day care for those times when regular childcare arrangements fall through. They will also urge human resources to start collecting data about day care challenges—via interviews with incoming and departing employees—to eliminate the management blind spot and prevent such problems from festering any longer.
The campaign is the latest example of employee activism in the tech industry, which has been roiled in recent months by standoffs between workers and management over everything from Pentagon contracts to binding arbitration.
If the Momazonians succeed, they will have helped engineer a major cultural shift at Amazon, where the needs of workers take a back seat to Bezos’s goal of satisfying the hallowed needs of the customer. Winning a backup day care benefit could theoretically help women move up in a company where only one woman is on an influential senior management team that reports directly to Bezos.
“Everyone wants to act really tough and pretend they don’t have human needs,” says Kristi Coulter, who worked in various roles at Amazon for almost 12 years and observed that many senior executives had stay-at-home wives. “You don’t want to be the one to step forward and say ‘I’m a mom with kids and I may not be as single-mindedly devoted to my career as everyone else.’ They're all trying to assimilate to this male-dominated culture.”
In an emailed statement, Amazon said it provides valuable benefits to its 250,000 U.S. workers, including health benefits that begin on the first day, flexible paid leave for new parents and discounts at day care centers around the country.
“When creating benefits, we focus on efforts that can scale to help the largest number of individuals, and work in partnership with our employees to ensure that what we build provides meaningful support,” the company said.
A tight labor market has pushed benefits to the forefront, making them a powerful recruiting and retention tool, especially in the competitive technology industry. The issue of paid parental leave, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says is available to only 17 percent of U.S. workers, has gotten most of the attention. But the focus has started to shift to childcare, which can cost almost as much as rent or college tuition.
Amazon has several family-friendly policies. Employees can take paid parental leave all at once or spread it out over time to suit their needs. They can share it with a spouse or partner not employed by Amazon who misses work due to pregnancy and childbirth. Parents returning after childbirth can work part-time for up to eight weeks to smooth the transition. Amazon reimburses mothers traveling for work for their breast milk shipping expenses.