The Vice President of Amazon has stepped down from his position due to the company firing protesting workers. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Taking to his official website, Tim Bray, former Vice President Amazon Web Services, explained why he “quit in dismay,” in an official statement. ⠀⠀
“Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison,” Bray wrote. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Bray revealed that he reached a breaking point and “snapped” when the company fired two employees who put together a staged climate walkout.
Back in March, former employees Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham created a petition requesting that Amazon take better care of their employees during the crisis.
Costa and Cunningham suggested that Amazon expand sick leave, offer hazard pay and child care for its warehouse workers, according to the New York Times.
Amazon also fired an employee by the name of Christian Smalls for leading a protest in response to a lack of support from the company and a poor pandemic response to COVID-19.
However, Amazon’s reasons for Firing Smalls was due to him breaking their quarantine policy after being exposed to the virus to attend the protest.
As for Costa and Cunningham, Amazon claimed they broke the company’s policy by asking co-workers to sign petitions. ⠀
“VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book,” Bray continued, adding that he decided to quit in solidarity with those who have been fired. “Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on the actions I despised. So I resigned. …The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.”
Bray exclaimed that the recent firings are “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
“I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison,” he added.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Furthermore, from the beginning of the outbreak, Bray said that Amazon’s response to the worldwide crisis has been “chickenshit” and “designed to create a climate of fear,” against its employees.
“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.”
Amazon has yet to comment on the matter.
