Jeff Bezos officially steps down as Amazon CEO July 5

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down on July 5. Yahoo Finance’s Max Zahn shares the details.

Video Transcript

- Monday marks the end of an era at Amazon. Founder and current CEO Jeff Bezos officially stepping down, handing the reins over to incoming CEO, Andy Jassy. Jassy takes over a business that appears to be running on all cylinders but faces many regulatory headwinds, as well as pressure from their own employees. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Max Zahn, who's been covering this issue closely. And Max, of course, you've been looking at the leadership change from the employee standpoint. What do you think is fundamentally going to change with Andy Jassy at the top?

MAX ZAHN: I think the labor movement is convinced that not a ton will change with Andy Jassy's takeover of the company. Jassy, of course, a long time executive at the company, has run Amazon Web Services, that cloud division, for more than two decades.

And I spoke to Randy Korgan. He's the Teamsters director of Amazon, running that recently-announced, well-funded, and ambitious campaign to organize Amazon warehouse workers nationwide. And I asked him now that Bezos is stepping down, and you yourself acknowledge that he's had a tremendous impact on the workplace across your sector for decades, do you think things are going to change with Jassy?

And Korgan told me, listen, we hope so. But he later added, we're not fools. So I don't think there's the expectation from that union side that there will be a change. Now you never know, as Korgan mentioned. And there is reason to believe that with the growing pressure from labor and with the negative press attention that came with that union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, a couple of months ago-- even though it was a failed union drive-- that the company will feel more pressure to make changes. And Bezos, even in his last shareholder letter as CEO, acknowledged, we need to improve things for our workers, saying, we need a vision for creating better value for our employees.

So at the very least, there is acknowledgment from Amazon that changes need to be made. Whether those changes will take place is another question that is yet to be seen.

- And I wonder how much buy-in or how much belief there is that any of that's genuine, since we've heard it for a while. And I wonder what kind of this dynamic might set up? Because we know Bezos isn't completely stepping away from Amazon. I wonder if there's a good cop, bad cop kind of situation coming in as Jassy takes the reins there, in order to get any of these improvements that a lot of workers have been calling for actually accomplished within the walls of Amazon.

MAX ZAHN: Absolutely. And I can tell you that that skepticism about whether Bezos even will wind down his role in day-to-day operations is felt widely across the labor movement and across labor leaders who I spoke to. I spoke to Stuart Appelbaum, as well, who is the president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union which ran that union drive in Bessemer, Alabama. And he was very skeptical that Bezos will be stepping down from a role in day-to-day operations of the company and will not have a say in its labor relations.

And it's even felt by him and by some others I spoke to that part of stepping down could be to take the heat off of him as somebody who's been a villain of the labor movement now for several years, to sort of reset the public perception of the company at a moment when it is facing more pressure than it ever has from workers.

- It's going to be interesting to see how Andy Jassy does in congressional hearings, for example. Because to your point, Max, so much of the attention has been on Jeff Bezos. You know, last week we were talking about that Teamsters vote. And we know that they have really been sort of ramping up public pressure on the company. You think a lot of these movements here, those on the union side of things, do they see a potential opening with a change in leadership at the top?

MAX ZAHN: And that's a good question. And I think from my conversations with them, they're somewhat resigned to the fact that Amazon still has immense power. They still have this gigantic workforce, and they are a big task for any union, even a well-funded union like the Teamsters. But they did express a sense that this shift of the guard does create, at the very least, as we sort of mentioned, a perception of change that could create an opening. With somebody like Bezos, who has a lot of public attention, he has a big profile-- to fill some of the vacuum that that creates, at the very least, in the public perception of the company and the public perception of its relationship to workers to give unions, to give the Teamsters, to give workers a bigger voice in that national conversation.

I think whether that bigger voice can lead to building the kind of power that the Teamsters want to build to put pressure on Amazon to eventually voluntarily recognize the union of its workers after the company has been so vociferously anti-union for several years now-- I think that's another question. But I do think they see a chance, at least to get workers' voices heard nationally in a way that maybe they haven't before.

- OK, and we'll be watching to see if there are any changes. We should mention Max has a write-up on our website, so you certainly want to check out that a little later.