Amazon stops drug testing on employees and announces that it will endorse Congress for cannabis legalization

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It’s not news that corporate culture is warming to cannabis, but Amazon’s new political change is hugely significant. The mega-corporation has just announced that it will no longer test its approximately 1.3 million employees for marijuana use. Instead, the company will “treat it like alcohol,” according to a post on the company’s news page.

The $ 1.5 trillion company, the second largest private employer in the United States, has managed to thwart recent union organizing attempts in Staten Island, Chicago, Sacramento, Alabama, Minnesota and, more recently, Virginia. Its CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced in 2020 that he would donate US $ 10 billion to the fight against climate change – news that met with skepticism as his company emits as much carbon dioxide as the entire country of Norway.

Amazon has also been criticized in the past for its cannabis ban policy. In 2020, Michael Thomas, a New York resident who wanted to work as a sorter in a warehouse in Staten Island, is due to have his job canceled because his drug test returned positive for marijuana use. In New York, it is illegal to test most potential new hires for cannabis use.

The company was previously sued by workers for allegedly quitting the employment of cannabis users.

However, Amazon currently sells a wide variety of CBD products that are obviously made from cannabis.

The company says the decision to end drug testing was based more on a desire to go with the political wind than a change of heart about personal freedoms or inconsistent federal drug policies.

“In the past, like many employers, we have banned employees from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana,” said Dave Clark, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, in which the policy change was made was announced. “But since the laws of the states in the US move, we’ve changed our course.”

Nonetheless, the post states, “We know this problem is bigger than Amazon,” and the company will now “actively support” the reinvestment and deletion of marijuana opportunities. [MORE] Plot. What they mean by “actively supporting” is throwing money (aka lobbying) into Congress to enforce state legalization.

The MORE Act legislation is the country’s best way to legalize cannabis at the federal level and would provide special business loans to cannabis entrepreneurs affected by the police force in the war on drugs.

The change to Amazon’s policy does not apply to positions regulated by the Department of Transportation, such as truck drivers and heavy machinery operators, who will continue to be tested during the application process. The postponement should bring some comfort to other types of potential and current employees who use cannabis off the clock, but the company will continue to conduct tests for impairment in the workplace.

The change in his marijuana policy wasn’t the only change Clark announced in the Post. Amazon will also introduce a new system to keep track of the time employees spend using enterprise software – the primary purpose of which is to identify system malfunctions, says Clark, and “only secondarily to identify underperforming employees.” Even if marijuana testing is off the table at the time of hiring, this “time off task” program could well lead to earlier debates about the way the “World’s Best Employer” company monitors its employees .