An Amazon employee who fell behind on her bills because of being underpaid sent an email to the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
In 2020, Tara Jones was cradling her newborn baby when she checked her paycheck to see that she’d was missing $90 of $540 she was owed.
While Tara said she reported the issue, it continued to happen and ultimately she ended up falling behind on her bills.
Understandably stressed out with her situation, Tara decided to email Bezos direct in the hopes of finding a resolution to the problem.
“I’m behind on bills, all because the pay team messed up,” Tara penned to the tech billionaire in an email seen by The New York Times.
“I’m crying as I write this email.”
Little did Tara know, her email went on to spark an internal investigation which found that Tara wasn’t the only one having this issue.
Amazon warehouse employees were having issues with their pay (Pexels)
And it wasn’t just the warehouse that Tara worked out that had even affected by this issue, but 179 others had potentially be impacted too.
Kelly Nantel, a company spokeswoman, said at the time that Amazon only finished paying its employees it owed money to months after the investigation.
As well as Tara, fellow Amazon employee James Watts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, said that his disability payments had ceased for several months early in 2021 and that this affected his own personal finances.
The problem seemed to be software related and is now thought to have been resolved.
The staffers were left behind on their bills as a result of the mixup (Getty Stock)
Speaking at the time of The New York Times’ damning exposé, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told The Independant: “We’re disappointed when any of our employees experience an issue with their leave.
“The New York Times article suggested these issues are widespread and ongoing. They are not. We went back and audited the period in question to make sure employees received their pay, and to our knowledge, there are no outstanding issues.”
Since the issues, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from Bezos in July 2021, pledged to improve the company’s leave system, in the hopes that they can become ‘Earth’s best employer’.