- Prominent
Amazon engineer andVP Tim Bray quit the company and published a searing blogpost this week calling the company "chickenshit" for firing workers who spoke up against itsworking conditions . - The post prompted a rebuttal from another current Amazon VP who called it "deeply offensive to the core."
- An unusual public back-and-forth between Amazon workers appears to be unspooling, offering a glimpse into how employees are grappling with the ethical questions facing the tech giant.
- One current Amazon employee suggested Bray had succumbed to assumptions by "radicalized" current and former colleagues.
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The dramatic departure of a prominent and outspoken Amazon engineer has stirred up a very public and very unusual debate between Amazon employees current and former over how the company deals with dissenting voices.
Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Tim Bray left the company last week. He wrote a deeply critical blogpost explaining that he had resigned because Amazon fired workers who spoke out against the company's warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.
"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of
He namechecked a number of workers who had been fired, including warehouse worker organizer Chris Smalls, and designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa.
After Bray's blog drew widespread public attention, current Amazon VP
He wrote: "Ultimately ... Tim Bray is simply wrong when he says "It's that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential." I find that deeply offensive to the core."
Looking under Porter's post shows a series of Amazon employees chiming in to agree with Porter and support the company.
Many of them lauded the steps Amazon has taken inside its warehouses, though few addressed Bray's specific points about firing whistleblowers.
One employee working in Amazon's drone department, Joshua Landry, wrote in response to Porter: "Well said Brad! I also found Tim's blog post offensive and out of touch with the reality of what we have been doing to keep Amazonians safe, the relentless priority of those efforts, and the unrivaled investments Amazon is making world-wide to protect and assist employees.
"Ultimately, I was shocked that someone of his caliber could succumb to unfounded opinions and assumptions of a few radicalized employees."
However, one comment on Porter's post came from former engineer Anthony Mai who said Amazon "operates in a toxic fear based corporate culture, based on my experience there."
Mai said he had been dismissed from the company.
Seeing this kind of back-and-forth between current and former Amazon engineers is fairly unusual, even as tech workers become increasingly outspoken about their employers' practices.
Amazon has had to implement a host of new policies and precautions as the coronavirus spread to its warehouses, including temperature checks and increased sanitation. Recently however Amazon rolled back a policy change it made in March to allow workers to take unlimited unpaid time off. It originally brought this in to help its employees safeguard themselves from spreading or contracting the virus.
Workers have also told Business Insider that in many cases the policies either aren't enacted inside the warehouse or are inadequate to protect employees from getting sick. Over 130 US Amazon warehouses have now reported cases of COVID-19.
Amazon has insisted that it doesn't fire workers for protesting working conditions, and a spokeswoman told Business Insider the employees Bray refers to were terminated for violating internal policies.
Amazon has run into PR trouble with its external messaging on employees in the past — last year a PR campaign which involved enlisting warehouse workers to tweet positively about their warehouses as "FC ambassadors" massively backfired and was widely mocked as company propaganda.
Read the original article on Business Insider