Hundreds of Amazon employees risk firing to protest the company’s climate policies
Hundreds of Amazon employees risk firing to protest the company’s
climate policies
@ANNIERPALMER MON, JAN 27 202012:29 PM EST
KEY
POINTS
- More than 340 Amazon employees signed
onto a post published Sunday criticizing the company’s climate stance and
protesting its external communications policy.
- It comes after Amazon threatened to fire
two employees for speaking out against its climate stance, claiming they
violated the policy.
- The employees also called out Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers and business with immigration agencies.
· More than 340 Amazon employees
are protesting the company’s external communications policy.
The
employees signed onto a Medium post published Sunday by advocacy
group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. It includes signatures and quotes
from Amazon employees, all of whom are named, across several divisions of the
company.
By participating in the post, the employees are
all defying Amazon’s external communications policy, which forbids employees
from speaking about the company’s business without approval from management.
“Amazon
participates in the global economy, where it has a substantial impact on many
issues,” Michael Sokolov, a principal engineer at Amazon, said in the post.
“Expecting its employees to maintain silence on these issues, and Amazon’s
impact on them, is really a reprehensible overreach, and I am proud to take
this opportunity to demonstrate my unwillingness to comply.”
The
protest was intended to show support for two Amazon employees who the company threatened
to terminate for publicly criticizing its climate policies.
Maren Costa, a user experience designer, and Jamie Kowalski, a software
development engineer, were warned that doing so was in violation of Amazon’s
external communications policy.
Earlier
this month, Costa and Emily Cunningham, another user experience designer,
appeared in a video from Sen. Bernie Sanders, which took
a swipe at CEO Jeff Bezos’ stance on the climate.
The
group also posted a video to Twitter on Tuesday that features Amazon employees
saying they “won’t be silenced” as a result of the company’s external
communications policy.
Amazon
said it encourages employees to engage with teams inside the company on issues
like sustainability. Employees can also voice their opinions by submitting
questions at Amazon’s all-hands meetings or joining internal interest groups,
as well as attending lunches and office hours held by Amazon executives, in
which discussions are confidential, the company said.
“While
all employees are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams
inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our
external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly
disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who
are developing solutions to these hard problems,” Amazon spokesperson Jaci
Anderson told CNBC in a statement.
Anderson
added that “of course” Amazon is passionate about the issue of climate change.
Scott
Ogle, a queue management analyst at Amazon, wrote in the post that the
company’s “role in the climate crisis is staggering and alarming.”
Ogle added that Amazon’s public
stance on the climate “does not add up” with its cloud-computing division,
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, working with the oil
and gas industries.
The
employees aren’t just protesting Amazon’s stance on climate issues. Software
development engineer Max Eliaser said Amazon should shut down Ring, the smart
doorbell company it acquired in February 2018. Ring has faced pushback over the
past year for its partnerships
with law enforcement agencies and privacy concerns. Earlier
this month, Ring acknowledged it
fired four employees for abusing their access to customers’ video feeds.
“The
deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried
centrally are simply not compatible with a free society,” Eliaser said in the
post. “The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no
balance that can be struck. Ring should be shut down immediately and not
brought back.”
Employees
also called out AWS doing business with U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, which has been routinely criticized for mistreatment of
asylum-seekers and refugees. Others criticized the “brutal labor conditions” in
Amazon’s warehouses. It’s an issue that has been highlighted repeatedly,
including in a recent Reveal investigation, which found that
serious injuries are much higher at Amazon facilities compared with national
averages.
Amazon
employees have increasingly pressured the company to address its environmental
impact. At Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting in May, thousands of employees submitted a proposal asking Bezos to
develop a comprehensive climate change plan and reduce its carbon footprint,
though it was ultimately rejected. The proposal was based on an employee
letter published in April that accused Amazon of donating to
climate-delaying legislators and urged the company to transition away from
fossil fuels.
The
employee group said in a release that Amazon’s response to their demands has
been “mixed.” In September, Bezos announced that
Amazon aims to rely on renewable energy entirely by 2030 and have net zero
carbon emissions by 2040. The plans were largely viewed as a response to
employees’ demands.
The day
after Bezos’ announcement, more than 1,000 employees walked out as part of the
Global Climate Strike and to protest Amazon’s climate policies.
The
employee group claims Amazon changed its external communications policy when it
learned employees were planning to stage the walkout.
However, Anderson, the Amazon
spokesperson, previously
told CNBC that the company’s policy isn’t new and that it was
revised to make it easier for employees to submit requests to speak publicly.
Amazon isn’t
the only tech giant to face employee unrest. Google has
seen internal
tensions grow over the past several years, as employees have
protested issues like the company’s government partnerships and its handling of
sexual misconduct allegations, among other things.
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