Some Amazon managers say they
hire people they intend to fire later
just to meet their turnover goal

Maybe I am naïve, but why would you have turnover goals? Wouldn't you want to hire, train and keep good people? Wouldn't letting people go be situational, not an actual goal?

This is another example of how trying to create metrics to measure performance can have unintended consequences. Someone in Amazon's upper management discovered a study, or Amazon ran a study, which discovered that a certain level of employee turnover was desirable because, on average, every company has a certain percentage of problem employees. That person in upper management decided that every manager should fire that percentage of their staff each year and gave them a goal of doing so. The problem is that the number of problem employees was an average and some managers did not have enough to meet the goal, so they went out and hired some so that they could fire them to meet the goal (and get their bonus).

Bezos must follow the Jack Welch philosophy that 10% of employees are not contributors and so 10% of the population should be purged regularly. The Aero Corp I worked at followed his lead 25 years ago eliminating10% of the population in each department annually which proved disastrous. Incompetence is not equally distributed across an enterprise.

This is standard practice amongst the large corporations. We use to call it use and lose. It happened to me when I worked for GM back in the 70's. They hired about thirty people to perform tasks on the assembly line, then just before all of us became eligible to join the union, they fired every last person from that group. I know a couple of other people that worked for other companies that had that done to them as well.

Jack Welch did this at GE and he was hailed as a management genius.

Sorry #3, I didn't see your post until later.

It's not callously treating people as objects to be exploited, it's "unregretted attrition (URA)." Hey, it's profitable, so who are we to argue? People are of value insofar as they can be squeezed for the last penny because the business of America is business, not uplifting citizens in any way.

Let's see . . . Who do they hire and see as most expendable? How about white male with an excellent work history? Yep. He's gotta go.

Jeff Bezos is the embodiment of the newest and seemingly most desirable leadership style in the U.S. which is mentally impaired, autocratic, anti-American and narcissistic. He encourages Amazon managers to use people as automatons all the while giving a trifle of his vast wealth to further undermine American workers through his initiative to underwrite the college educations of illegal aliens. James Charles? Basically the same story. Take a look at his picture which speaks for itself.

The managers that said that will probably be included in the turnover soon.

This is the kind of response you get at the 'worker bee' level when the morons-in-charge create mandatory firing goals, secure in their superior wisdom that "you can never, ever have an actually good work force, there are always slugs that you must get rid of". And it becomes unchangeable policy in many/most big companies. I worked for a large company which had a version of Rotten Jack Welch's evil management approach, developed at GE, that REQUIRED 10% of the work force to be rated as subpar during the annual employee evaluations. No matter if you had 20 employees and their actual ratings ran from A+ to the worst at a legitimate A-, that A- employee had to be gigged and beat up seriously by management for a year, have a personal improvement plan, etc, etc. Treated as if he was a D- terrible person doing a terrible job. Often, in a good group of workers, this was just an annual rotation "your turn in the barrel" and a private apology from your boss. Systems like this which ABSOLUTELY insist that no matter how much you work to hire the best people, train them well, motivate them to do a good job, and winnow out the deadwood over many years......the evil system assumes that you can NEVER actually succeed in finding and creating a good work force where everyone in it is a good employee. GOTTA (by policy) be some folks that need to be beat up and pounded on and driven out of the company over time, those "horrible" A- folks gotta go. Some of the smarter first levels just rotate this around, everyone gets their chance, and don't have this stigma again for 10 years or however many employees you have. This is one of the least harmful ways to deal with Rotten Jack Welch's horrible system. Sounds like Evil Jeff Bezos has made an even nastier system, that requires hiring sacrificial employees to be fired later. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and very destructive to a company rather than helpful. And it DOES drive good employees away, or when they find that some are 'hired to be fired', they just won't apply to work there.

Policy pioneered by Joseph Stalin, except that he did firing squad instead of merely firing.

There's nothing as bad as a corporate HR goon. They tend to be brutal, remorseless, compassionless individuals. Watch any documentary on Nazi work camps and tell me if you see any similar behaviors and attitudes. Imagine the "win-win" scenario of the HR person... they need them to fire employees and they need them to hire them back. Justice is only served when the HR department gets whacked along with all the other departments at cutback time.

Another problem with this "management" style is that those in leadership must find the next bad apple to fire, so they're always looking to find the next worst in line - a never-ending hunt. Pitiful way to run any enterprise. Certainly doesn't build an environment of trust or improvement of people, the true wealth of any organization.

What a company? So full of touchy, feely lefties who taunt their employees. Buy local and starve this company.

Wow #11, that system you describe was familiar to me from my time working at a TX grocery chain. They categorized people and thereafter treated them as such. Good hard workers were never promoted but just so far IF some middle manager had decided the employee was a “B” instead of an “A.”

The practice began with Caligula. He decimated (reduced by one tenth) his military each year, to eep them on their toes. (He also placed his horse as a senator - not a bad idea. Here in Pa, we have two senators, each of whom is the rear-end of a horse.) The USAF has a history of RIFing good pilots, after a war has ended. They have to many pilots, and are heartless in their decisions. I used to have lunch in the hospital dining hall with an e-5 staff sergeant who had been a lieutenant colonel, command pilot, 20,000 flight hours, flew combat in WWII and the Korean War, In 1957, he was RIFed, and stayed as an e-5 to save his pension. And when he asked why he was RIFed, no one could explain how the decision was made. One of the reasons employers are having a tough time to recruit is because of some bad management HR practices.

It is a ludicrous policy, but you know, top management has to earn their $millions.

Turn over lets the company avoid raises...it's a common tactic among SCUM companies like Amazon!

This falls under the Marxist premise of USEFUL IDIOTS...use them then toss them!

Hmmmmmm - I wonder if this isnt what happened to me a couple of years ago - I took a contract job for a position that I had NOT applied for but accepted because I was given the impression that it could turn into something permanent and there was opportunity for advancement. I took it also because such contract jobs had paid off for me extremely well in the past. Instead, what I got was relegated to a desk where I had to beg around for work, and was often left with nothing to do, and was given no training in what it was I *was* given to do, and essentially ignored as an employee. I even went to the recruiter that set up the contract position to ask if he'd heard anything from management that I needed to know about my performance and he knew nothing at all. I hung in there for a good four months waiting for them ti decide to let me go and I eventually had to quit because I got tired of wasting my time in a position where I was treated like scum by the women in the office (Im a woman), and generally blown off by the manager. The company I contracted for had a VERY long and well established reputation in the Houston area and my husband was impressed when I told him Id be there. Now I wish Id never accepted it because it really did a number on my psyche and confidence. People/companies who do this are evil. Welcome to the new robber barons...

#17, there was a period in the early 60s when the USAF was up to it's eyeballs in LtCols, literally. They had huge numbers of pilots from WW2 and Korea, and many had stayed in and done a good job. A relative was one, and a friend of my USN family in S. Fla was another WW2 USAF pilot. The SLIGHTEST miscue of any minor type, ANYTHING to give an excuse, and BAM.....gone. My relative realized what was coming and retired in the early 60s. The friend in Fla was in charge of a USAF radar installation in the Keys. A pair of Cuban student pilots objected to using their helo to strafe escaping Cuban refugees in their small boats from the air, so they shot the Russian instructor one fine day, dumped him over the side and flew the helo at literally 10 ft over the water to Key West and landed at the commercial airport and defected. The USAF Lt Col was fired 'because he didn't detect the approaching Cuban aircraft'. That the helo was literally "under the radar" for all but the last 4 or 5 miles, which would have taken about 2 to 2.5 minutes, and even then be essentially impossible to separate from the 'ground clutter' on the radar scope was no excuse. Totally impossible that his team could have done any better with the equipment that they had....but a convenient way to dump another excess LtCol. I'm sure there are literally thousands of similar stories. There were probably 10 or 15 Lt Cols for every Col slot, and they just had to get rid of them.