Amazon Vice President Quits Over COVID-19 Firings, Citing “Vein Of Toxicity Running Through” Company
May 5th 2020
Amazon eCom (Stock Catalog)
By Hunter
Tim Bray is an Amazon vice president—or he was. In a post on his website, Bray writes that he left the company on May 1 after "five years and five months of rewarding fun." Though Bray was a vice president in the cloud computing arm of the company, he resigned after watching the company’s treatment of protesting Amazon warehouse workers.
"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19."
Amazon has, at best, been caught flatfooted in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was evident from the beginning that Amazon warehouses could become vectors for the disease, just as would be the case in any plant that relies on large numbers of workers to work the same lines, touching the same surfaces, with few breaks and few health protections.
Amazon's infamous hostility to improving worker conditions—the company may be raking in enormous profits, but has done so by treating laborers as poorly as laws will allow them to get away with—could have been put on pause at least long enough for a media-friendly push by the company to make sure their workers do not die on the job, but that proved too much to ask. The company's ingrained reflex is to treat warehouse workers as expendable.
Bray describes the company's immediate retaliation against complaining workers bluntly. He calls the firings "chickenshit" and "designed to create a climate of fear."
"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."
The "fire whistleblowers" policy is "evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture," says Bray. "I chose to neither serve nor drink that poison."
This is not the first time Bray has been at odds with the company. As he notes, he was part of the movement by Amazon employees to demand better climate policies from the company, a movement that Amazon also responded to by threatening workers. But he also praises Amazon as "exceptionally well managed"—though with a "lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power."
Amazon does appear to be taking steps to alleviate COVID-19 concerns in their warehouses. Any competent managers realized weeks ago that the worst publicity of all would be for the company to become a poster child for dangerous work conditions and face widespread pandemic closures, as is happening throughout the similarly worker-contemptuous meat processing industry. Retaliating against workers who bring those problems to corporate attention—even if doing so means steamrolling over lower-level management after repeated safety requests go unanswered—is a screwup that came about precisely because Amazon believes its lowest-rung employees are worse than machinery—cogs who deserve as little pay as possible, as little maintenance as possible, and who can be replaced with newer models the moment they begin to show wear.
It seems nonsensical given that the company is flush with money and could easily be a monument to good management and gathering up public goodwill and support. But Bray is right: The current edicts of capitalism, and therefore of managers considered top-tier material in companies as large and influential as Amazon, are to funnel cash upwards while shirking worker, environmental, and social responsibilities to law-bending degrees. Such companies only do good deeds for the publicity of doing so; being asked to do good deeds on an ongoing basis by revamping worker conditions to better ensure health, pay, or satisfaction, makes the management layers bristle in anger.
Posted with permission