By Nicholas
Amazon has reportedly threatened to fire employees who recently criticized its environmental policies in the Washington Post — the newspaper that’s owned by Amazon’s billionaire boss Jeff Bezos.
A lawyer at the online retail colossus wrote to at least two activist workers, Maren Costa and Jamie Kowalski, after they gave a joint statement to the Washington Post in October criticizing Amazon for providing cloud-computing services to oil and gas companies, the paper reported on Thursday.
Amazon lawyer Eric Sjoding warned one worker that she had violated a company communications policy and that further violations could “result in formal corrective action, up to and including termination of your employment with Amazon,” according to the paper, which Bezos bought in 2013 for $250 million.
Emily Cunningham, a third employee who has been critical of Amazon’s environmental stances, told the paper that she was warned in an October meeting that she broke the communications rule.
“It was a clear attempt to silence me and other workers who have been speaking out about the climate crisis,” Cunningham told the Washington Post.
Amazon reportedly updated its policy last year to require a “business justification” to talk publicly about the company, which can take up to two weeks to get approved. The changes also cut down on the number of people who have to give approval, Amazon said.
Amazon said it started tweaking the approval process last spring but communicated the changes to staff in September — the same month that hundreds of employees walked out to protest inaction on climate change.
“Our policy regarding external communications is not new and we believe is similar to other large companies,” Amazon spokeswoman Jaci Anderson said in a statement. “… As with any company policy, employees may receive a notification from our HR team if we learn of an instance where a policy is not being followed.”
Amazon’s threats are the latest reported move by a big tech company to clamp down on employee activists. Google fired four employees in November who were reportedly organizing colleagues around social issues, which led to a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Google has said they were canned for violating the company’s data security policy.
