An Amazon vice president quit over firings of employees who protested
A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon Web Services, wrote in a blog post that his last day at the company was Friday. He criticized a number of recent firings by Amazon, including that of an employee in a New York City warehouse, Christian Smalls, who had led a protest in March calling for the company to provide workers with more protections.
Small’s firing has drawn the scrutiny of New York state’s attorney general.
Bray also criticized the firing last month of two Amazon employees, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who circulated a petition in March on internal email lists that called on Amazon to expand sick leave, hazard pay and child care for warehouse workers. They had also helped organize a virtual event for warehouse employees to speak to tech workers at the company about its workplace conditions and coronavirus response.
Bray, who had worked for the company for more than five years, called the fired workers whistle-blowers, and said that firing them was “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
“I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison,” he wrote.
Amazon declined to comment Monday. The company had previously said it fired Smalls because he had violated its policies by leaving a quarantine — he had previously been exposed to a sick worker — to attend the protest at the site.
Amazon told Costa and Cunningham that they had violated a policy that forbids Amazon workers from asking their co-workers to donate to causes or sign petitions.
The company has rolled out various safety measures at its warehouses across the country, such as temperature checks and mandatory masks.
Bray acknowledged in his blog post that Amazon was prioritizing warehouse safety. But he said he also believed the workers.
“At the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of COVID-19 response,” he wrote. “It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.”