Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking publicly about climate change, group says
- Amazon is said to have threatened some employees from a group that pushed the company to combat climate change with termination
- A company policy was updated last year to require workers to seek approval before speaking about Amazon as employees in public forums, employees say
A group of Amazon employees who pushed the company to combat climate change say their employer has threatened to fire some of them if they continue to speak out about its internal affairs.
Two were threatened with termination, a spokesperson for Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said, and a total of four were told in meetings that they were in violation of the company’s policies on workers speaking to the press and on social media.
Maren Costa, a user experience designer, was threatened with termination after speaking to The Washington Post, according to a statement from the group. “This is not the time to shoot the messengers,” Costa said in the release. “This is not the time to silence those who are speaking out.” (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos.)
Jaci Anderson, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the company’s external communications policy is not new. Employees are “encouraged to work within their teams,” and may suggest “improvements to how we operate through those internal channels.”
Amazon shares rose 1.6 per cent to US$1,877 at 12.44pm in New York.
The tech industry has been roiled by employee activism in the past couple of years. After Google workers raised concerns about bidding on military contracts, the Alphabet search giant backed out of a US Defense Department drone program and decided not to bid on a contract to build cloud services for the Pentagon. Employees at Microsoft and Salesforce.com pressured executives about their companies’ dealings with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.