‘CLIMATE OF FEAR’

Amazon Vice President: ‘I Quit in Dismay’ at Company Firing Whistleblowers

“Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned,” Tim Bray wrote in a blog post.

Tim Bray, an engineer and vice president at Amazon, says he quit his over $1 million job after the company fired “whistleblowers” who sounded the alarm about a lack of safety measures to protect warehouse workers amid the coronavirus outbreak. “I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19,” Bray, who worked at Amazon for over five years, wrote in a post on his website. “Stories surfaced of unrest in Amazon warehouses, workers raising alarms about being uninformed, unprotected, and frightened,” he continued. “Remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.”

The company has fired several warehouse workers and corporate employees who expressed concerns about safety issues in recent weeks. Amazon, however, has claimed that it “terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.” Bray asserted in his post that Amazon’s actions are “designed to create a climate of fear.”