The article is slightly vague, but my takeaway is that employee got raises. Those numbers went through a bunch of people. The pay went out for months. Then, they realized they miscalculated the raises. “Whoops, we didn’t mean to offer you $150k, but really $140k.”

1. I think they have no chance at getting back the pay from before. This isn’t a banking error, this is regret. As an employee could you be like, “whoops I messed up my budget. I wouldn’t have taken this job at $150k. Please backpay me to bring it up to $180k”.

2. It’s well studied that losses hurt more than gains feel good. People hate having their comp lowered and the stock has already fallen. May be better to leave the comp where it’s at. I mean, it’s not like it was 10x or something. The numbers were reasonable enough for this to be super wide spread and people to not notice for months.

If Bob signs a contract for Alice to paint a fence for $800 and a copy-paste error transfers her $1000 instead, yes.

But if the copy-paste error happened before the contract was signed? Leading to Bob promising Alice $1000 and signing a contract promising it? Then in all probability, Bob will end up paying the contract amount.

This has zero to do with the actual matter at hand, given that the people getting the raises 100% believed they were getting raises.

A contract is an agreement between parties. Parties are free to agree to changes to the contract.

* Both parties (AMZ & Employer) signed up to a bonus % in the contract

* There was a document that stated % was equivalent to $ which was miscalculated

* Employer agreed to pay whatever the % in the contract was, employee believed they were getting the $ in the estimate.

There are not takebacks here.

Actually, I know there legally could be, as these situations aren't always black and white, however the company, being such a position of power compared to the employee, loses all goodwill in this situation. If I were in this situation, I would already be sending out feelers.

Let the lawyers get together and do a retroactive class-action lawsuit to solve it. But Amazon will do whatever it wants until that suit comes through.

But yes: if these were contractors Amazon had hired it would be very different.

An at-will employee and their employer contract that for each hour of work (or each ~week salaried) performed by employee on instructions from employer, employer will pay to employee $X.

Just because such a contract doesn't contain any term indicating the length of time an employee will work doesn't make it less of a contract.

As further evidence, if at-will employment were not a contractual agreement there'd be no recourse for the employee to recover unpaid wages. And yet unpaid wages are recoverable.

Every raise I’ve ever received has been accompanied by a “contract” hr puts in my folder.

Work done for contract is a real thing, it's just not applicable here. When you hire a plumber or a caterer or a security consultancy, you write up a contract ahead of time describing exactly the work to be done and the bill to be paid, and then get the courts to enforce that when needed. That is simply not the way that salaried employment works in the USA. It's not.

Every job I’ve had has had a contract, and it’s usually “we pay what we want, we terminate you when we want, and you quit when you want.”

Now, sure, it's true that some elements of an employment agreement may constitute contracts and may have been enforced by courts. Back wages are a big one, obviously. Likewise promised benefits being denied, etc... But at-will compensation and termination just don't qualify. They don't. The Amazon workers can't sue for their mistake raises under contract law becuase those raises don't constitute contracts. Period.

Banks offer accounts with “whatever we feel like” interest rates. Bonds can have “whatever we feel like” interest rates. Stocks can have “whatever we feel like” dividends. Short term rentals have “whatever we feel like” rental prices.

In practice, the payer offers a very short term guarantee: “for the next pay period, you will get $50 an hour”, but after that pay period they change it.

There are contracts behind all these things.

One party offers something on a continuous basis: labor, money, etc. The other party walks away when they don’t like what they’re getting.

I'm pretty sure if you do work, as contractually agreed, the contract requires you be paid for that work.

It's just a contract agreeing rates for work done, not a contract guaranteeing work will be done.

Yes it does (and I even said so in the comment you replied to), but compensation plans, raises, offer letters, etc... are not payment for work done, and are not contracts for work for the reason stated. These Amazon folks aren't getting a penny, and it absolutely stuns me that people want to argue otherwise.

>note that at-will employment simply lacks several (the big one being "certainty"). In particular a "contract" that says "you can do whatever" is clearly not a contract under common law.

Which was in reply to a comment about every job having a contract.

Further your other examples could be contractually enforced.

If you accepted an employment contract based on the compensation plan, that forms part of the contract. Raises are updates to the contract, unless you're saying it's potentially ok to claw back 40 years of pay raises when some one retires. Offer letters are probably more questionable but if there's a specific start date and pay has already been discussed, it seems to me that that would form a contract.

The key thing in this particular situation seems to be that there was an error, and the error was rectified quickly.

That’s theirs.

But going forward, they don’t have any right to any level of pay above minimum wage.

I’ve personally dealt with this. I had an employer run out of money and be acquired by a new company. The new company owes paychecks for last pay period, but wants to pay everyone lower salaries.

Going forward the new company could pay whatever (above minimum wage). But they owned all the debts of the previous company including that last months wage.

We only had at will hiring agreements, but that didnt matter.

Let me be more concrete: am employer presenting you with a plan for future compensation[1] in an existing employment relationship does not constitute a contract. They can pay you what they want to pay you.

[1] Your back wages argument doesn't apply here. These people never got paid at all.

Moving it to a savings account is tricky because the automatic clawback will pull from whatever account it was sent into.

Once the company issues a W2 or 1099 the next year that covers it, I would consider it relatively safe to keep.

But other groups I'd be a bit more worried about them being willing to go to extra-judicial means to if not get the money back, at least get "revenge".

As a non American this seems... Flawed.

Big caveat that this is a US-centric view.

But, continued employment is easily dependent on recovering the overpayment one way or another. Usually by taking it out of future paychecks.

There is a huge precedent for companies not paying for compensation calculation mistakes, which is also supported by law (in the UK at least where I am from - but assume it would be the same in the US).

Amazing how many comments in this thread are acting like this standard practice is a completely new thing with zero precedence.

You'd be surprised how many people follow the adage: "what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right."

In this case, a verified compensation item given to an employee should be respected on principle, as this isn't a one-time "whoops we overpaid you," it's a months-long process that affected many people. AMZ should write it off as a bonus and move on.

Not just like cash. Like cash that may be worth 50% or more money by the time it vests.

Hopefully, it won't get that bad for large public companies but there are probably people out there today who are banking on their total comp being $400K (and making decisions on that basis) when it's actually more like $200K or less.

Should be both. To the latter, it depends how it’s structured. But typically by looking at a few years’ compensation.

Source: Recently went through the mortgage

That's not unusual. Well, 2x salary might be, but it's well established that job hopping is the only way to guarantee your salary stays close to market.

There is probably a missing category of employees who have been successful, gotten raises, and aren't shopping for jobs

A lateral job hop comes with a >10% raise, while an annual raise is 3-6%.

If the “best place to work” made an error like this, they would figure out a way to let the employee keep it.

Most places wouldn’t. But if I was in charge of a FAANG, an error like this happened, and I was committed to making the FAANG the “best place to work”, I’d cough up the change.

Does Amazon want to be the best place to work, or not?

So do I, and it depends. There was a whole case recently where chase (iirc) accidentally sent tens/hundreds of millions of dollars to a lender, and the lender chose to interpret it is an early loan repayment, and was allowed by the courts to keep the money.

No. The appeals court smacked them silly in a unanimous opinion and the money was returned to Citi [1]. From the appellate judge:

> In a separate opinion, Circuit Judge Michael Park called the lawsuit a “straightforward case that many smart people have grossly overcomplicated and that we should have decided many months ago.”

> “Put simply, you don’t get to keep money sent to you by mistake unless you’re entitled to it anyway,” Park wrote

1. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/citi-wins-appeal-500-millio...

BTW, I've had stock options that were never above water.

That'd be most stock options in private companies, though.