The ecommerce giant Amazon reported that it will no longer test job applicants for marijuana and announced the company’s support for The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act).
The bill before Congress aims to legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge criminal records of people who have marijuan convections and would invest in impacted communities.
“Given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course,” said Dave Clark, Worldwide Consumer chief executive officer for Amazon.
“We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law,” Clark declared.
He also announced: “We will no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive [pre-employment] drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, and will instead treat it the same as alcohol use.”
Attorney J. Stephen Smith of the Graydon Head & Ritchey law firm said, “The difficulty is to come. If there is a workplace incident such as a forklift accident, the testing will be done afterward.”
“In the case of alcohol, a BAC number will result, indicating whether the employee was impaired. With marijuana, the test will only reveal that the employee has a level of THC in their system from sometime during the past month or so,” he notes.
Repeat testing can only determine if an employee is using more or less THC over a period of time, but not exactly when they were THC impaired, he adds.
“Without a zero tolerance policy for THC, what is the resulting employment outcome in the case of an accident?” Smith asks. “An alcohol impaired employee is likely terminated if drunk while working and involved in an accident. If an employee has a level of THC in their system, on the other hand, but there is no method to determine ‘when’, then what? It will be very interesting to watch Amazon’s posture evolve moving forward.”
Smith believes Amazon has vetted this position to the granular level internally and externally. This will certainly make hiring easier for Amazon, and will likely attract good workers who use marijuana responsibly, the way others use alcohol,” he notes.
“The excitement will be when Amazon shows the world that the wheels didn’t fall off, attracting more companies to join Amazon’s position. In turn, when enough large companies push the federal government to remove marijuana’s Controlled Substances Act listing as a Schedule I narcotic, it might happen.”
Loosening the Reins
At the same time, Amazon sought to address criticism about its work practices, including unrelenting pressure to fill orders as well as other work demands seen as unfair to workers.
It has modified a policy called Time off Task. A method for measuring the amount of time employees are logged onto the software tools in their work area, in the past it alerted management about when workers appeared not to be working or a problem eisted with the systems needing attention.
“The primary goal of the Time off Task metric is to understand whether there are issues with the tools that people use to be productive, and only secondarily to identify under-performing employees,” Clark claimed.
He said Amazon is now averaging Time off Task over a longer period “to ensure that there’s more signal and less noise – reinforcing the original intent of the program, and focusing Time off Task conversations on how we can help.”
He stressed that the new goal is to re-focus the conversations on instances where there are likely true operational issues to resolve.
