Appeals process

I’ve obtained a copy of the Amazon Appeals process, which is interesting in several ways:

1. It’s biased in favor of management, since they never give people complete details or evidence of what they’re being written up for at the time they give them the writeup; they want you to explain what happened, which is impossible if you don’t know any details.

2. Step 1 of the appeal is allegedly the same as you receiving the notice of your writeup, even though it’s listed as a separate step. So even though you don’t have all the details of what you’re being accused of, just receiving notice qualifies as Step 1 (talking with your direct manager about it). Can’t imagine the problem with that.

3. Step 2 of the appeal is to have the Site Leader/General Manager/Assistant General Manager review the issue and let you know of their decision (they could uphold it or overturn it). While this appears fair on the surface, it isn’t, since anyone in management has a vested interest in not overturning a writeup, so that’s a built-in bias that they don’t want to see.

4. Step 3 of the appeal is to have the Site Leader/General Manager/Assistant General Manager or the Appeals Panel review the issue and make their decision. Again, if it’s anyone in management doing this, it’s inherently biased against you, no matter what they might say that they’ll be fair and impartial: that’s complete bullsh*t. The other option of having the Appeals Panel hear the case and decide is far more fair, but still not impartial. Because one of the people there will be someone in management, the panel members would have every reason to be concerned about reprisal if any of them vote to overturn the writeup. Makes no difference that there’s a policy against retaliation; it still happens every single day.

Notice also the date on those forms: May 2017; which means that this was dreamed up last year without any input from the people most affected (the associates; the ones who do the real work), and no consideration as to how it’s biased and how such bias can be eliminated. Even worse, our local sites are among the last ones to be rolling this out, which means that Amazon has had this in place for about a year, yet never told us about it or attempted to roll it out to all sites at the same time. So while management has been busy writing people up for various things for that long, they never provided any way to appeal, and no oversight of the managers who write people up simply for disagreeing with them.