Twitter Reacts to Amazon's Maternity and Paternity Policy Changes

In the wake of the New York Times' Amazon exposé, which shed light on a "bruising workplace" culture, the e-retailer/tech giant has been making reputation-enhancing adjustments.

The story, published in August, alleged an environment where employees are "encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late ... and held to standards that the company boasts are 'unreasonably high,'" according to an unnamed source. Following the report, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, plummeted from the No. 1-rated CEO to No. 87 in October's Harvard Business Review. 

Among Amazon's modifications are a new parental leave policy, announced Monday, which offers 20 weeks of paid leave for new mothers and six weeks of paternity leave for new fathers; the latter move prompted chatter across Twitter:

Still, others believed the announcement had less to do with creating a positive workplace environment, and more to do with PR crisis control:

Amazon has not explicitly stated that the policy changes were motivated by the New York Times story, but, either way, the story brought attention to the importance of fair labor practices in the booming tech industry.