Amazon Reportedly Wants People to Know It’s a Weed-Friendly Workplace

Amazon is urging the fleets of contract supply drivers that get packages to its clients to promote themselves as 4/20-friendly employers, according to Bloomberg.

Opinion polls have proven majority help for marijuana legalization for years, and that help is now overwhelming, with one survey this yr displaying over 90% help for legalization in a single kind or one other. Amazon first introduced it will cease screening most job candidates for marijuana use, save for Department of Transportation-regulated jobs like heavy equipment operators and truck drivers, in June 2021 because it expanded hiring footprint in weed-legal states together with New York and Virginia. Bloomberg reported that correspondence between Amazon and the third-party entities that function its blue supply vans, in addition to interviews with 4 house owners, present it’s also advising them to explicitly promote that it does not display for marijuana use in job listings. In one message, Amazon claimed that may enhance the variety of candidates by 400% whereas screening for marijuana cuts the applicant pool by 30%.

One of the supply companions instructed Bloomberg they’d stopped screening for marijuana because of excessive charges of testing failure and now deal with methamphetamine and opioids. However, one other supply companion instructed the community insurance coverage and legal responsibility considerations have been a purpose to proceed drug testing regardless, including, “If one of my drivers crashes and kills someone and tests positive for marijuana, that’s my problem, not Amazon’s.”

Low-wage staff have been hit especially hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and jobs in that class are down by double-digit percentages relative to the beginning of the pandemic. Employers have reported problem filling roles in current months, usually blaming expanded federal and state unemployment advantages (which has been debunked by countless studies, and the advantages are set to expire imminently anyhow).

As CNBC reported, one trigger is probably going that the hiring surge after most states loosened pandemic restrictions has resulted in a extra aggressive job market the place staff are much less inclined to take the primary terrible job that comes alongside. That’s coupled with the comprehensible reluctance to return to roles with a excessive threat of contracting the virus or that may’t pay for issues like childcare. The most blatant resolution is paying staff extra; whereas CNBC famous many employers have felt their arms pressured by lingering openings, U.S. companies are broadly determined to keep away from elevating wages.

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Working at Amazon as a supply driver is a notoriously bad job rife with labor abuses and fixed surveillance, and as Bloomberg noticed, the corporate is infamously gradual to conform to increased supply charges that may allow contract fleets to lift wages. While not testing for marijuana use is actually welcome within the sense that it conflicts much less with fundamental human decency, it looks as if a handy short-term workaround for not simply making the roles much less of a hellhole.

An organization spokesperson instructed Bloomberg that marijuana testing disproportionately impacts minority communities. They added, “If a delivery associate is impaired at work and tests positive post-accident or due to reasonable suspicion, that person would no longer be permitted to perform services for Amazon.”