A vice president of Amazon resigned over the company’s firing of employees who raised the alarm about working conditions in its warehouses during the coronavirus pandemic.
Tim Bray announced his resignation in a post on his website last week, saying he “snapped” following the firings and could no longer stay with the company after he expressed his displeasure “through the proper channels.”
“Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned,” Bray wrote.
He described the company as “chickenshit” for firing and disparaging the employees who organized the protests, adding that the terminations were “designed to create a climate of fear.”
Amazon fired two employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who had previously been critical of the company’s climate policies and denounced the conditions at its warehouses as unsafe during the pandemic. Another worker, Bashir Mohamed, was fired after calling for safer working conditions.
Chris Smalls, who was involved with a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse to protest working conditions, was also terminated. When Smalls was fired, Amazon executives denigrated him as “not smart or articulate,” according to leaked audio.
“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 wrote. “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”
Bray is the highest-level Amazon employee to speak out about the company’s treatment of its workers, though he said he believed the company was investing large sums in warehouse safety.
“But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. 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,” he wrote.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about power balances,” he added. “The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they’re gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.”
