Hundreds of Amazon workers are risking their jobs by openly criticizing the company’s record over climate change. On Sunday, over 300 employees had signed their job title and Names at statement on the blog post on Medium. The protest was hence done online and was organized by a group of employees. The members of the protest called themselves “Amazon Employees for Climate justice”. The advocacy group was formed earlier this month. In fact, according to the members, they were also threatened by the company for getting fired if they continued speaking to the press.
Sarah Tracy, a software engineer in Amazon said: “It’s our responsibility to speak up, and the changes to the communications policy are censoring us from exercising that responsibility.”
In response to the statement by Sarah, Amazon said that the external communication policy of the company is not new and that it is keeping up with other large scale companies. The company’s representative further told the press that Amazon’s policies are applied to all the employees and do not specify any specific group.
“While all employer is welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics, we do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing the solutions to these hard problems.” According to the representative of Amazon.
Amazon uses fossil fuels for powering its vehicles that are used in shipping packages all over the world, leaves the company with a massive carbon footprint and the workers of the company had been very vocal regarding some of the practices by Amazon.
In 2019, over 8000 employees wrote an open letter to the founder and CEO of the Company Jeff Bezos requesting for Amazon to cut its carbon emissions and end its usage of fossil fuels. In fact, according to the employees, Amazon should quite be working with the oil and gas companies that use technology developed by the company for finding a deposit is of fossil fuels.
Amazon spokesperson also said the company had already pledged to transform into net-zero carbon by the year 2040 and will use 100%renewable energy by 2030.
