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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
After reading the NYT article about Amazon's work culture, it's pretty clear it would not be a good fit for this city. Sure, Calgary has a lot (for a smaller city) of skilled and tech-savvy workers. But those workers are accustomed to a corporate culture that could scarcely be more different from Amazon's. With its flex days, generous vacation, flex hours, maternity and paternity leave, and informal workplace atmosphere, Calgary's oil patch culture came about because of a severe worker shortages. Companies bent over backwards to make themselves as attractive as possible to employees, and so created one of the more employee-focused and agreeable workplace environments around.
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Work shortages may have lead to companies going above and beyond to attract staff, but to suggest that the same workers who saw the not so cushy side of the O&G corporate culture during the downturn are under the delusion that emloyers will always go above and beyond for them to the point where they won't work at a place that offers any less seems like a bit of a stretch.
Alberta has had some of the worst employment standards in the country for some time, there are plenty of workers who do not to expect a lot. I'm actually interested to know what you felt put the oil and gas industry culture above others. You listed things like generous vacation and maternity leave. How great was the vacation entitlement and since when were maternity leave rights revoked from all other places of employment? I wonder if people think flex days and an informal environment were worth the price having zero job security.
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Amazon is the opposite. I doubt there are enough highly skilled, ferociously competitive workaholics in this city to fill 10 per cent of the positions. And Amazon churns through employees at an incredible rate, with most lasting only a year. Where are the replacements going to come from for that rate of attrition? Amazon isn't going to want to pay for expensive international relocation for thousands of positions a year. A city in the population and education dense northeast U.S. makes far more sense.
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I hear a lot or examples(admittedly only from posters on this site) of workers who are having to do the work of their laid off former coworkers for less money than they were earning before. Seems like we have a lot of go getters and a lot of people who are looking for work. I think you'd be surprised at the number of employers operating in Calgary who have a revolving door when it comes to employees, Amazon would have no issue finding employees in this markets and retention issues would likely be the same as at any other company that operates with their business model in Calgary.