The announcement marks the second one high-profile departure in as many days within the tech international. On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg — one of the most highest-ranking girls in company The usa — introduced she was once stepping down as leader working officer of Fb, the corporate she helped develop into right into a digital-advertising behemoth.
Amazon declined to remark past the corporate weblog and Clark’s word. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Publish.)
Clark’s ascending occupation at Amazon reflected the corporate’s sprawling expansion; he started as an operations supervisor, then moved as much as a regional basic supervisor place, and in the end oversaw the tech massive’s whole international shopper industry. When he joined the corporate, Amazon had simply six success facilities. It has since swelled into a company colossus, raking in $470 billion in gross sales remaining yr and is valued some of the elite membership of trillion-dollar corporations. Its operations now span on-line buying groceries, groceries, streaming, devices and Internet services and products.
However Clark’s tenure, which started in 1999, has additionally been marked through a bunch of prison, regulatory and hard work problems that experience drawn the nationwide highlight on Amazon, the country’s second-largest non-public employer.
Unionization pushes at a Bessemer, Ala., warehouse and in New York have served as the foundation for a resurgent hard work motion this is reverberating within the retail and generation sectors. Amazon employees concerned within the union drives have advocated for upper pay, expanded advantages and higher remedy for team of workers — together with extra breaks and less-intense surveillance in their day by day behavior. The corporate counts greater than 1,000 U.S. warehouses.
As issues about operating stipulations at Amazon higher in frequency, together with complaint from legislators, Clark was once from time to time fast to protect the corporate. “I regularly say we’re the Bernie Sanders of employers, however that’s no longer somewhat proper as a result of we in fact ship a innovative administrative center,” Clark stated in a tweet that he later deleted.
In June 2021, Clark introduced Amazon’s intentions to turn into “Earth’s Perfect Employer,” pledging in a weblog publish to make Amazon a more secure position to paintings and to melt the corporate’s emphasis on productiveness metrics. The publish was once an replace to a statement made through Bezos two months previous in a shareholder letter. However a file later discovered that the harm price for employees at Amazon in 2021 was once greater than double that of employees in different warehouses.
Clark has headed Amazon’s logistics operation during the coronavirus pandemic, rolling out protection protocols to stay warehouses and deliveries in steady operation but in addition going through questions on whether or not the corporate was once appropriately and transparently reporting case counts and an infection charges. In January 2021, Clark wrote a letter to President Biden providing to assist with the distribution of coronavirus vaccines. One month later, the New York Legal professional Normal filed a lawsuit in opposition to Amazon accusing the corporate of “flagrant fail to remember for well being and protection necessities.”
In recent times, Amazon has additionally turn into a widespread matter of congressional scrutiny. Investigators on Capitol Hill discovered that Amazon was once amongst a handful of tech giants that engaged in anti-competitive, monopoly-style ways and referred to as for sweeping adjustments to federal regulations to empower regulators, in step with a 2020 Area inquiry that spanned 16 months and culminated in a 450-page file.
In his function as shopper CEO, which he began in January 2021, Clark oversaw a good portion of Amazon’s industry, increasing his logistics and operations tasks to incorporate retail and electronics. In April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy introduced that Amazon can be pulling again on growth in a few of the ones arenas, together with shuttering a lot of its bricks-and-mortar retail footprint, as a result of slowed expansion.
