Amazon is advocating for cannabis to be legalized, the online retail commerce giant has revealed.
Amazon has ‘reinstated the job eligibility’ of individuals dismissed for failing marijuana tests and will stop future pre-employment tests of that sort.
In a statement issued on Tuesday morning, the firm said:
“Given our previous support for legalizing cannabis at the federal level, as well as expunging certain criminal records and investing in impacted businesses and communities, Amazon recently announced our support for, and began actively lobbying on, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act).”
As we go on through the COVID-19 pandemic, there have certainly been far-reaching impacts owing not just to the magnitude of the infection but the methods by which businesses have been compelled to attempt to control it. One significant consequence is an influence on employment and the very abrupt decrease in applications.
On September 21, 2021, an Amazon corporate blog post revealed the next step toward legalizing marijuana, including the elimination of penalties and pre-employment tests.
The organization claimed that part of the purpose for their lobbying campaign was to make recruiting simpler, reported Business Insider.
“We’ve discovered that removing pre-employment testing for cannabis enables us to broaden our candidate pool,” Amazon senior VP of human resources Beth Galetti said.
“Pre-employment cannabis testing has adversely targeted communities of color by delaying job placement and, by consequence, economic development, and we think this inequality is unacceptable,” stated Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti.
In June, Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer CEO Dave Clark stated the corporation will no longer test prospective workers for cannabis usage, signaling the corporation’s endorsement for federal marijuana legalization.
In addition to this attempt to eliminate penalties against workers who are also cannabis users, Amazon has indicated its desire to push for the government legalisation of cannabis as a whole.
The bulk of Amazon’s enormous workforce – 950,000 workers in the US and 1.3 million individuals across the globe – is made up of warehouse personnel.
This set of employees have a famously high turnover rate of about 150%, according to a New York Times article, leading to some Amazon managers fearing the organization may run out of hirable Americans.
Business Insider claimed that Amazon had actually spent probably $5 million on lobbying activities.
Also Read: Medical Marijuana Revenue of Nearly $7 Million Transferred to Veterans by Missouri Authorities
Despite pledges, the Biden Administration seems to have been sluggish and frugal in steps towards the liberalization and legalization of cannabis at the federal level. With Amazon putting a fresh wave of support behind it, it will be fascinating to watch whether the needle of support for such legislation shifts.
Amazon has been a regular topic in anti-union debates, but this initiative (though likely mostly aimed at keeping business going through a big staff) at least seems to have the potential to help a large number of people.
Stay tuned for further developments as we continue to pursue this subject.
