Two web designers say they were fired by Amazon for organizing a virtual town hall to hear from the company’s low-paid warehouse staff.
Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who were both web designers at Amazon, were fired last month after they organized a virtual town hall for Seattle colleagues to hear from the company’s low-paid and largely uninsured warehouse staff. Those workers, Cunningham and Costa said, are toiling in the trenches amid a pandemic that is goosing the internet giant’s stock price even as some of them are dying of the coronavirus.
“The Jeff that I knew and worked with and went to meetings with in the early days was not the Jeff, I don’t think, that would do this, do what he’s doing today,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s that he’s just increasingly more and more out of touch ... with his warehouse worker employees or just with humanity in general. He seems to have some blind spots.”
“Amazon actively tries to break up any attempts at unionization and that’s part of why they were so threatened by...the livestream [town hall] that we were trying to set up, which was not just tech workers organizing and not just warehouse workers organizing, but tech workers and warehouse workers organizing together,” Costa told Skullduggery hosts Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman. “That’s what made them censor the event, fire Emily and me and try to shut down the entire conversation.
“At the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response,” Bray wrote. “It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential.” Bray went on to say that firing whistleblowers is “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.” His blog post went viral this week.
Both women said they have been deeply disturbed by changes in the Amazon corporate culture, which they said emphasizes profitability and customer service over the rights of warehouse workers. Cunningham cited the firing of worker and whistleblower Chris Smalls as one example of the company’s lack of ethics. Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and eight other U.S. senators signed a letter to Amazon pressing company officials to disclose more information about the whistleblower firings.
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