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Amazon told its corporate employees on Monday that they had to return to working in the company’s offices five days a week starting in January.

The new rule — up from a three-day-a-week mandate set in 2023 — appears to be the most stringent return-to-office decision among big tech companies and could be a harbinger of more to come.

That Amazon, which has always operated with tighter rules for its corporate work force than its peers, is leading the way back to the office is not a surprise. Amazon has over the years shunned plush corporate campuses and lavish employee perks common among tech companies, while giving managers attrition targets for how many people should leave their teams.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, wrote in a memo. Mr. Jassy said in-person collaboration allowed Amazon to move fast and retain its culture, which he said had become particularly hard to maintain as the company grew quickly during the pandemic. “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” he wrote. The change will affect more than 350,000 corporate employees. Amazon also has more than a million employees working in warehouses and operations.

An internal site for Amazon employees, viewed by The New York Times, said that attendance would be monitored by swipes of corporate badges, and that employees must return to the office even if there were not many members of their team in their location. It said the company was working to make conference rooms more available and was adding about 3,500 so-called phone booths in offices to accommodate the additional employees.

Amazon’s internal messaging channels lit up with discontent over the changes, according to screenshots of the messages. “The whole situation is just very depressing and de-motivating to say the least,” one message said. They also questioned how the changes fit with Amazon’s stated mission to become “Earth’s best employer.”

Since they essentially shut down their offices in the early days of the pandemic, tech companies have been inching toward getting employees back. Right now, other big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple expect employees to work in the office two or three days a week.

Giving employees workplace flexibility allowed companies to save money on office space and to offer work flexibility as a perk. But executives are increasingly saying there have been trade offs that they no longer want to make.

As employers focus on productivity, they also note that outside the office people have returned entirely to prepandemic levels of activity.

“There is a sense the pendulum swung way too far in the opposite direction — this ‘the office is super optional,’” said Zach Dunn, co-founder of the workplace management platform Robin, which has helped companies put in place hybrid policies. “A lot of people are swinging back to this idea, ‘We were better off beforehand.’”

Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford who studies work-from-home policies, noted that many companies had frequently done turnabouts on their return-to-office rules. In a February survey of more than 2,600 workers, nearly 40 percent said they had experienced two or more changes in company R.T.O. rules.

Offices across the country have reached over 50 percent of prepandemic occupancy, according to Kastle, the workplace security firm. Just over a quarter of paid workdays were done from home in August, according to research from Stanford.

At some companies, the specter of layoffs has motivated employees to spend more time in the office, wanting to strengthen in-person relationships. Amazon also said on Monday that it planned to increase the number of people a typical manager oversees by 15 percent by the end of March.

Mr. Jassy also said the company was making the change in order to flatten its organization, but employees questioned whether it could also open the door to layoffs.

Amazon left open the possibility that some managers could be laid off, according to an internal Frequently Asked Questions page with more details, viewed by The Times. It said each team would review their structure and, “it’s possible that organizations may identify roles that are no longer required.”

In the past, when Amazon has eliminated roles, it has laid off employees if they do not find or accept a new position at the company.

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AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Seattle Children’s Hospital filed a lawsuit in Travis County District Court on Dec. 7 against the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG), after that agency requested documents related to gender transition policies and any such care provided to Texas children.

However, hospital claims that the OAG lacks jurisdiction to demand such records from the hospital, and that Washington’s “Shield Law” protects it from requests made by states that “restrict or criminalize reproductive and gender-affirming care.”

“The Shield Law prohibits Washington-based entities such as Seattle Children’s from ‘[c]omply[ing] with subpoena, warrant, court order, or other civil or criminal legal process for records, information, facilities, or assistance related to protected health care services that are lawful in the state of Washington,'” the lawsuit stated.

KXAN reached out to the OAG multiple times prior to publication; however, the agency never replied to our requests.

What does the OAG want?

According to copies of the OAG’s requests (included in the hospital’s lawsuit), the OAG sent two demands — a civil investigative demand and a notice of demand for sworn written statement.

The first demand, which has an issue date of Nov. 17, told the hospital that the OAG was investigating “misrepresentations regarding Gender Transitioning and Reassignment Treatments and Procedures and Texas law” that allegedly violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.

That demand gave the hospital until Dec. 7 to produce documents to the OAG for the agency to identify the following:

All medications prescribed by the hospital to Texas children The number of Texas children treated by the hospital Diagnosis for every medication provided by the hospital to Texas children Texas laboratories that performed lab tests for the hospital prior to prescribing medications Protocol/guidance for treating Texas children diagnosed with gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria or endocrine disorders Protocol/guidance on how to “wean” a Texas child off gender transitioning care The other demand gave the same deadline date for the hospital to answer questions about the above points under oath.

Both demands include a notice that failure to comply could result in a misdemeanor criminal charge that would carry a $5,000 fine or jail confinement of up to a year.

Hospital leaders affirm no Texas ties

While OAG extended its reach across state lines, the hospital has not, according to the hospital’s Chief Medical Operations Officer Dr. Ruth McDonald and two hospital senior directors.

McDonald, in a sworn affidavit, told the court that the hospital does not have property or accounts, nor employees who provide “gender-affirming care” (or administrative services for that care) in Texas or based in Texas.

“Likewise, SCH [Seattle Children’s Hospital] providers have not provided telemedicine services to Texas residents for ‘gender-affirming care’…or ‘Gender Transitioning or Gender Reassignment Procedures and Treatments,'” said McDonald in her affidavit. “Based on a search of records by our revenue cycle department, there is no record that SCH has provided any ‘gender-affirming care’…or ‘Gender Transitioning or Gender Reassignment Procedures and Treatments’…using public money from the State of Texas or with reimbursement from Texas’s Medicaid or Texas’s child health plan programs.”

The affidavit also claims that the hospital “has not marketed or advertised” transition-related medical care in Texas.

The two other affidavits were filed by a senior director responsible for the hospital’s email system and the senior director responsible for the hospital’s electronic health records system. Both swear that all of the servers and devices providing those services are based in Seattle.

Sham requests and overreach of authority

“The Demands should also be set aside because they are not bona fide investigation into violations of the DTPA and therefore are not proper exercise of the Attorney General’s authority,” the lawsuit states. “The Demands are an improper attempt by the Attorney General to investigate and enforce recently-enacted [Texas] SB 14 against Seattle Children’s based on healthcare services that may have been provided by or at Seattle Children’s within the State of Washington.”

The lawsuit cites definitions made in Senate Bill 14 that restricts the law’s scope to Texas:

“Seattle Children’s is not (and cannot be) in violation of SB 14. The Demands are, therefore, an improper and ultra vires attempt to enforce SB 14 beyond the scope of the statute and beyond the authority of the Attorney General,” the lawsuit states. “The Attorney General, through the Demands for documents and information…is improperly attempting to investigate healthcare that did not occur in Texas.”

Along a similar line, the hospital’s attorneys claim that such an investigation violates the U.S. Constitution’s dormant Commerce Clause, which prevents States from enforcing “protectionist” laws that would erode a national marketplace.