Your marijuana habit won’t prevent you from working at Amazon.
Amazon has decided to stop disqualifying people who have applied for employment and may have tested positive for marijuana use.
The company received a message from Amazon’s Dave Clark, CEO, worldwide consumer, that addressed the change in its drug testing policy.
“We’re adjusting our drug testing policy. In the past, like many employers, we’ve disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use. However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course. We will no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, and will instead treat it the same as alcohol use. We will continue to do impairment checks on the job and will test for all drugs and alcohol after any incident.
“And because we know that this issue is bigger than Amazon, our public policy team will be actively supporting The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act)—federal legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge criminal records, and invest in impacted communities. We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law.”
In the same announcement, Amazon also announced a change in its policy called Time off Task, which measures the amount of time an employee is logged into the system software and monitors the activities of an employee. Although the company claims the system identifies issues that may prevent employees from being productive, Amazon admits that it measures their underperformance.
Now, the Time off Task policy will be measured over a longer period of time “to ensure that there’s more signal and less noise—reinforcing the original intent of the program, and focusing Time off Task conversations on how we can help.”