Hundreds of Amazon employees defy company gag order

Amazon has 14 principles its employees are supposed to use every day, with “customer obsession” the most famous.

An internal revolt at the tech giant shows employees using one of Amazon's lesser-known principles: “have backbone; disagree and commit.”

More than 360 employees had enough backbone and disagreed enough with a company gag order to commit acts of open defiance.

At the risk of losing their jobs, the tech workers issued statements Sunday. The statements were followed by a video on Monday protesting Amazon’s gag order as well as its massive carbon footprint and partnerships with fossil fuel companies.

“We are speaking up now because some of us were disciplined by Amazon for providing a quote to the Washington Post where we state that Amazon should stop helping oil and gas companies find and extract oil more quickly,” the video states.

Two leaders of the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice were threatened with termination in November after they spoke to a reporter with the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The group then got 364 employees to defy Amazon’s prohibition on speaking without authorization about the company’s business, products, services, technology or customers:

• “Amazon announced a pledge to increase climate transparency, yet is taking action to silence their own employees who wish to hold them accountable to their commitments and actions.”— program manager Brianna Harvey
• “We seem to be doing the bare minimum, instead of boldly taking the lead and creating the necessary. I am especially disappointed with the way Amazon now utilizes communication policies as a silencing mechanism.” — software engineer Marek Ventur
• "Amazon’s decision to continue offering AI services to oil and gas is against its own climate pledge.”— data associate Yoshi Ludwig
• “By cutting ties with big oil we can show that we truly are committed to the future and not short term profits. You simply cannot be for the earth and still be turning a profit from fossil fuel.”— management analyst Amanda King

“It’s a lot of emotions together,” Amazon software developer Sarah Tracy, who participated in the mass defiance, told KUOW. “I’m excited. I’m scared. I’m nervous.”

“It’s scary to know that your voice could be taken away, and that’s just not something we’ll stand for,” Tracy said.

In response to the action, Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson emailed KUOW: “While all employees are 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.”

Her email said the blackout on speaking about Amazon was not new and was similar to other large companies.

Anderson declined KUOW's interview request.

After external and internal pressure last year, Amazon revealed its 44-million-ton carbon footprint (three times as large as Google’s and nearly three times as large as Microsoft’s) for the first time in September.

Bezos then announced that his company would use only renewable energy within a decade. Also, Amazon aims to slash its carbon pollution to “net zero” — through an undisclosed combination of reducing its own carbon pollution and sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky elsewhere — over the next two decades.

Members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said Amazon needs to move faster to address its growing role in the world’s ongoing climate crisis and said they had a “moral responsibility” to speak out.

“My family back in California has had to worry about evacuations from fires, and everyone’s hearing about the fires in Australia, and it didn’t feel like something I could sit and be silent on,” Tracy said.

On Monday, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted his support for the employees "courageously speaking out" and called Bezos a hypocrite: "You cannot call your corporation a 'leader' on climate change while partnering with ExxonMobil and BP to extract more fossil fuels."

In addition to Amazon's role in damaging the world's climate, employees criticized its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, working conditions in the company's warehouses and the privacy-violating technologies it sells.

“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” Amazon’s “backbone” leadership principle states. “Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”