May 4, 2020

“Designed to Create a Climate of Fear”: Amazon VP Quits After Company Fires Activists

“It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture,” he said.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty

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Tim Bray, a vice president at Amazon, announced he’s leaving the company because of the “chickenshit” firing of activists who spoke about conditions at the company’s massive warehouses.

Bray, a high-level engineer at Amazon Web Services, laid out his complaints and reasons for stepping away in a damning blog post worth reading in full.

It centers on Amazon’s warehouse policies, which—as we’ve reported on before—have been the target of employee strikes for increased safety, pay, and workplace protections. Workers say there is a lack of personal protective gear, inability to stay six feet apart, and not enough cleaning. (The company told Mother Jones, in a previous statement, that safety measures, including masks, temperature checks, and hand sanitizer are “standard” across facilities; that social distancing has been implemented; and that protest numbers “grossly exaggerated.”) Last week, a group of Amazon employees, organized under the banner “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice,” held a town hall to discuss conditions in the warehouses.

Amazon’s response has been retribution.

Chris Smalls, a worker at a State Island Amazon warehouse, was fired soon after leading a protest (Amazon says for violating a 14-day quarantine). And two organizers with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice—Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa—were fired for organizing the town hall, Bray says. “The justifications were laughable,” he writes, “it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.”

“It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture,” he continues. “I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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