The walkout is indeed a sign of a growing, cross-industry movement by employees to move the needle on their employer’s business practices on social and political issues. “This is a historic milestone for our industry and shows that we will only continue getting stronger until tech treats everyone equitably.” TWC helped coordinate employees at major companies who planned to join Amazon workers in participating in the strike. “The tech climate strike is proof that tech workers across the industry are becoming more confident in our power to shape the future,” the organizing group Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) said in a statement to Recode. It’s remarkable that employees at Amazon, known for a grueling work culture in which employees put on a unified public front and are sworn to secrecy, are now leading a protest in their sector. The walkout was a historic moment for tech activism and the largest-ever company protest by workers in the industry. Several leaders of the Amazon protest say they were inspired by last year’s Google walkout in which 20,000 employees left work to protest the company’s payout of high-powered executives accused of sexually harassing employees. In 2019, as public and political scrutiny of their companies increases, these employees have mobilized to pressure their companies on political issues ranging from selling AI tech military use, providing products to oppressive governments, and discrimination and harassment in the workplace. These employees’ coordinated involvement is a sign of how far the growing tech labor movement has come since rank-and-file workers began organizing over the past several years. (Google announced a day ahead of the walkout that it’s making a major investment in wind and solar energy.) So far, 700 Google employees have pledged to walk out, along with others at several other major tech companies including Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter. “Our work is interesting and challenging, and it’s tough to see the company not prioritizing things that are so important.”Įmployees from several other major tech companies have joined Amazon’s lead, calling on their companies to change business practices to reduce climate change. “I would love to be in a meeting where one of the criteria or goals around the design that I’m proposing is, ‘How much carbon does this remove from our footprint?’” Weston Fribley, a software engineer at Amazon and one of the organizers of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the group organizing the walkout, told Recode. (Bezos said he would “take a hard look” at whether donations are going toward climate-change deniers but made no promises.) Amazon declined to comment directly on the strike. Organizers told Recode they want to see Amazon set a more aggressive plan for the company to reduce its carbon emissions to zero they want it to stop selling its cloud services to the oil and gas industry and they want it to stop donating to politicians who deny climate change’s existence. On Thursday morning, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced in Washington, DC, that the company is making a pact to follow the Paris climate agreement - a cross-country pledge for nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - and it is also pledging to be carbon neutral by 2040.īut Amazon employees who plan to walk out of work say it’s not enough. Employees are calling on Amazon to reduce its carbon footprint as part of a larger, youth-led global climate strike that has planned hundreds of events around the world.Įven ahead of their walkout, protesters have already seen results. It will be the first time in Amazon’s 25-year history that its corporate employees have participated in a walkout demonstration. On Friday, over 1,500 Amazon workers plan to walk out of work to protest their company’s environmental impact.
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