Amazon pushes office return plans back to 2022

Amazon.com Inc has pushed back plans for its workers to return to the office to January next year as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday, the ecommerce giant said it will not expect employees to return to its offices until January 3, an extension of its previous guidance which had planned to end the work-from-home (WFH) period on September 7. READ: Amazon hit by record EU data privacy fine The company also told Reuters that it will continue to mandate mask-wearing at its offices except for staff who have been fully vaccinated. Amazon’s move comes amid growing concerns about the Delta variant of COVID-19 sweeping across the US, with several states, particularly those with lower rates of vaccination, seeing spikes in cases over the summer. The surge has led many companies to reassess their plans to get employees to come back into the office, with Google parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) saying last week that its WFH policy will be extended to October 18 while Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) said it will close workspaces it had previously reopened. Others, such as Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), are instead mandating that employees be fully vaccinated before they are allowed back in the office. However, Amazon’s policy does not extend to the workers that pack and deliver products from its massive warehouses, which contain the majority of its giant 1.3mln strong global workforce. In pre-market trading in New York on Friday, shares in Amazon were flat at US$3,373.