COVID-19: Episode 11: Amazon VP Quits Over Firing of Whistleblowers

[mdlbear]

It isn't often that I see the name of someone I've met, and respect, in the lede of a New York Times article, but here you go:

Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm, said the firings were “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”

A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said on Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

But first go read his blog post - it's scathing. Here's a sample:

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

Snap! · At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Here are a couple more quotes:

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.

[...]

Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

The post links to other press coverage of Amazon's cavalier treatment of its warehouse workers during the pandemic.

Personal note: I met Tim at a Web conference twenty years or so ago, when I was working on an XML-based project at Ricoh -- Tim was one of the authors of the XML spec. Turns out he's also an environmental activist, and a signatory to an Open letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors calling for Amazon to adopt "an immediate company-wide plan addressing climate change". That's well worth a read, too.

Comments

A couple of other points

[ng_moonmoth]

I didn't see these get much play, in the post or the comments, but it seems to me that they are both obstacles to getting any real reform.

First, there's a sort of Gresham's Law of employment at work here. Bray, who was speaking out about things that he saw that were not in accordance with how he thought warehouse employees should be treated, was forced by company hostility toward his viewpoint out of his position. Presumably, the next person in that position will be more inclined to yield to the company line, which will further stultify progress toward more human treatment of warehouse employees. We can see this writ large in the current administration, which has from the start made a nearly ubiquitous practice of driving out ethical and principled people and replacing them with sycophantic toadies with dubious, at best, qualifications for the positions they were rewarded with.

Second, there is not nearly enough recognition that current corporate treatment of low-rank employees amounts to externalization of the cost of paying them enough and providing them enough resources to do their job without harm (of all sorts!). I don't know whether or not it's worse than releasing toxic chemicals into the environment rather than dealing with them properly; people are getting hurt either way. But, while unions are a worthwhile step in that direction, I doubt much will change until we once again have a government for the people that willingly accepts and projects its responsibility, in the name of the people by whose authority it governs, to redress this imbalance. (I know, I know -- good luck with that. But hitting companies where it really hurts -- in the bottom line -- and compensating the people who have been hurt by their actions, is something that might be worth a try.)

Re: A couple of other points

[mdlbear]

I think you are (unfortunately) correct in this.

Like your icon.

Re: A couple of other points

[ng_moonmoth]

I like yours, too.

Bet you didn't need to look at anything to work mine out, either. That last band is supposed to be silver, even though it didn't come out too well. And my guess after the election, about how much of the incoming administration's actions I would be able to tolerate, wasn't too far off -- and there aren't any tighter tolerances, anyway.

[amaebi]

I wish Bray's comments were getting more play.

COVID-19 and its consequences seem to be bringing about some public stirrings of attention to the framing of labour as worthy mendicants, but I'm so afraid it will just fade away. Because for any given person, the vast majority of labour is Not Them.