Amazon's slow climate action: Defying company policy, over 300 employees speak out

350 employees working under the tech giant Amazon spoke out against the company's toxic climate practices, despite being warned that they could be fired for violating the e-commerce giant’s communications policy.

The quotes in question were published by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers concerned about the company’s business with the oil and gas industry as well as its carbon footprint.

Spokesman Drew Herdener issued a statement saying that Amazon encourages workers to advocate for causes they believe in but wants them to pursue those convictions when related to the company’s business internally.

Employees can join internal interest groups, submit questions to executives during all-hands meetings, and attend lunch sessions with Amazon leaders to discuss the issues as long as they are willing to keep matters raised in those sessions confidential.

“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 or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems,” Herdener added.

The employee group claims credit for pushing Amazon to take those steps, but it wants the company to go further. The group demands Amazon to become carbon neutral by 2030, to stop funding politicians and lobbyists who deny climate change and to end cloud-computing contracts that help energy companies accelerate oil and gas extraction.

Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of 'The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,' stated that concerted effort is rare among white-collar workers, and even rarer among the coders, testers and engineers who work for tech titans. O’Mara said, “These high-skilled workers are among these tech companies’ most valuable assets.”

Criticism from employees crossed boundaries when it condemned Amazon’s cloud-computing business for its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which many have blamed for separating parents from their children at border facilities. Amazon's treatment of its warehouse staff has also been brought into question due to complaints about unsafe working conditions.

At the centre of Amazon's culture are 14 administration norms, proposed to direct basic leadership at the organization, including “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.”