Front Burner - Amazon whistleblowers on their journey from inspired to fired

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Amazon has seen an incredible demand for its products during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it is also facing a wave of criticism over not doing enough to ensure the safety of its warehouse workers. We speak with Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham - two former Amazon tech employees. They say they were fired, because they tried to raise awareness about the conditions at Amazon warehouses.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. So in the first three months of this year alone, Amazon made $75.5 billion U.S. in revenue. That's up 26% from the same time last year.

Now, I don't need to tell you what hit the world in the last few months, but it's fair to say that Amazon was one of the rare companies chalking up a sales boom during the initial stages of the pandemic. And while that was happening, we started hearing concerns from the workers in the warehouses about the risks they were facing to continue fulfilling orders during the pandemic. When management tried to come out and kick us out and intimidate us and threaten us, we tried to deliver our demand. Today, two women who spoke out, first about Amazon and climate change,

then about workers' safety in COVID-19, and they lost their jobs because of it. This is FrontBurner. Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham both worked as user experience designers for Amazon. So I actually want to start at the very beginning. You both worked for Amazon for a combined 21 years. Maren, you worked there for 15 years, Emily for six years. What initially made you want to work for Amazon, Maren? I was really attracted to Amazon because of the spirit of innovation. And we were, you know, making the world a better place in some ways by taking this sort of website that had been designed by, you know, geeky men, and turning it into something

that the wider human population could use really easily and seemed more, could feel more at home at. And what about for you, Emily? What was the initial appeal of working for Amazon? There are so many brilliant people that work at Amazon. And I had just finished grad school and had just been doing a little bit of work about six months before I landed at Amazon. And I wanted to be there because I wanted to learn from the best. And so over time, during your time there, you both became vocal on climate change. This is an issue that is important to both of you. And you tried to push Amazon to make changes.

So last year, along with other employees, you write this open letter to the CEO, Jeff Bezos, basically asking him, hey, can you please release a company-wide climate plan? Emily, tell me more about that. What made you want to do this? The story really starts about a year and a half ago, where there was a group of us who co-filed a shareholder resolution asking for climate leadership from Amazon. Leonard Cohen wrote, we are so small between the stars, so large against the sky. Jeff, will you stand with us and adopt this resolution or will you ignore the most important opportunity we've ever had to take bold climate leadership when it mattered more than anything has ever mattered. And we met with them a month after we co-filed, so in January of 2019.

And when we met with leadership then, and as our capacity as both shareholders and employees, we really saw that the company was not leading. It was lagging behind all of its peers. You know, Amazon at that time, that meeting would not even commit to a date for a date for releasing its carbon footprint. So the bar was extremely low out of the top 10 retailers. Amazon was the only one not to do this. And so after we had this meeting, when we saw the company is just really not willing to move, we've had this idea of drafting this open letter to Jeff Bezos and the board of directors

to adopt this shareholder resolution around climate change. And also not just that, but really lead on climate because we saw that Amazon has this incredible opportunity to lead the global economy really because of where it's positioned

in the global economy. That if Amazon shifted, it could really lead the entire world to transition off of fossil fuels. So we had people across the company from the lowest level, level one, up to the VP level. There was huge, broad support. Over 8,700 people signed this open letter. My name is Rajit Iftikhar. I'm a sophomore engineer at Amazon. I'm a proud son of Bangladeshi immigrant parents. So often, countries like Bangladesh are forgotten and not considered in decisions that impact them.

I want Amazon to do more on the climate crisis because I think it is unacceptable for one of the richest companies in the world to continue to take half actions as the consequences of its emissions put so many lives of the global poor at risk. And essentially, you ask Amazon, hey, create a plan. Cut your reliance on fossil fuels. And that proposal is voted on. It's rejected by a majority of shareholders. But in the end, Amazon does release details of its carbon footprint for the first time.

Bezos says the company would be carbon neutral by 2040. And one of the things that we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that our business is, it's a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large, physical infrastructure. We're not only moving information around, we're moving packages around. That if we can do this, anyone can do this. So at that point, Moran, how did that make you feel about working there? That was sort of in a direct response to the employee pressure. And it was a huge step forward. And so we definitely played a role in that coming to fruition, especially probably on the timeline that it did. Yeah, I think it's important to note that the announcement by Jeff Bezos around the climate pledge was in direct reaction to employees organizing. reaction to employees organizing. So we decided to participate in the global climate strike that young people had asked adults to join. And it was the first time in Amazon's history that tech

workers walked out. And there were over 3,000 of us around the world in Amazon's global offices that did this. So including Vancouver and Toronto. I'm walking out. I'm walking out. I'm walking out. Because those that are the least responsible for the climate crisis are the ones feeling the most climate impact. Because everything is on fire and it's not fine. Let me just hop in here because I want to ask you about that, Emily. So to that point, it sounds like things are pretty good. You both are at this company that you want to be working for. They're letting you, you know, speak out and stuff. But you say that after all this was said and done, you both get a warning by HR. So what did HR warn you about, Emily?

Now, it's notable that Amazon did not come after us when people were doing that right around the time that they announced the climate pledge, because it wouldn't have been a good story for them that Amazon silences the very employees that pushed them to make this pledge in the first place. And so they waited until October. And Maren and I spoke to two different HR representatives. They told us that we had broken the updated external communications policy. The company says Cunningham repeatedly violated internal policies and that we support every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions. And so basically when you say that the updated policies by the company, external communications policy, basically said, look, you can't publicly disparage or

misrepresent Amazon and you must have a business justification for talking to the press. So, Marn, when you get this warning, you think what? Well, I guess I wasn't surprised because I had worked at Amazon long enough to know that it was very tight-lipped with regards to speaking to the press at all, let alone criticizing Amazon. But I wanted to work with Amazon. I wanted Amazon to become a better corporate citizen, a more caring contribution to the planet instead of a very destructive one. So we had 400 tech workers give quotes and go on record that we published online where they were intentionally breaking the external communications policy in mass defiance

so that none of us could be, you know, fired for doing it. Because if they can't fire everybody, then they can't fire one person because they would be targeting. From there, I just want to hop forward, fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic when Amazon sees this, I mean, it's already a Goliath, but it sees this like enormous increase in demand. We've been hiring quite a lot in general, and we're now opening 100,000 new positions across the country. And at the same time, reports emerge alleging concerns over the safety of its warehouse workers.

In Ontario, a worker told us the priority is still speed over safety. You might be going into an aisle and there might be other people there. And if you wait before you go into an aisle to pick the item or do whatever you need to do, then that's considered punishable because you're accumulating time that's off task technically, and they track that. Emily, when did you first hear about those concerns and what did you think about them?

They told us that they felt very scared and very unsafe in warehouses and asked us for our support. And we said, you know, of course we'll support you, not just as co-workers at the same company, but as fellow human beings. co-workers at the same company, but as fellow human beings. And Maren, tell me about like, what specific concerns did you hear from the warehouse workers you spoke to? Everything from the most basic safety procedures and protocols not being met. So not having PPE, not having six foot distancing, not having hand sanitizer. Every safety concerns from the most basic to to the more nuanced. And, you know, it's it's fair to say that Amazon started, you know, with a really low bar, but did continue to roll out safety procedures. low bar but did continue to roll out safety procedures and that's what Amazon likes to highlight is we've rolled out 150 new safety procedures since you know the the virus started. Amazon says it's providing masks for employees doing temperature checks

sanitizing regularly and taking physical distancing seriously. But then my response to that is, why during that time when you knew that you were not meeting basic safety measures, why did you keep production running at full throttle? Why didn't you throttle back on production, ship only essential items and keep your workers safe when you knew that you weren't meeting a high enough safety bar. The owners of Amazon's head of operations, Dave Clark. I could not disagree more strongly with the premise that we're late to this party. I think quite to the contrary. I think we've been early on the curve. I think we've been early on the curve. We see COVID cases popping up at roughly a rate generally just under what the actual community infection rates are because our employees live and are part of those communities.

Is it true that you heard a story you heard from someone that managers wouldn't let people on the line know that someone had coronavirus until the end of the shift so people wouldn't walk off? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you can imagine how would you feel that if you, in your workplace, you didn't learn about a COVID case from the time that they first learned about it until eight days later? How would you feel working your entire shift? And then you're told at the end of your shift that there are new coronavirus cases positive cases in your work environment that they that they wanted they didn't want you to go home because you were scared so that they waited to tell you that amazon admits an employee at a brampton warehouse tested positive last week and was sent home three days later this employee says he found out about the case by chance. My buddy was like, did you get the text? I'm like, what text? Amazon told us in an email it's sharing news about

COVID-19 cases with all employees, not just those close to the individual, but all individuals who work at that site. And one of the, I suppose one of the other big differences was what your job was at Amazon. So in March, Amazon asked its tech workers in Seattle to work from home because one employee was diagnosed with the virus. And you say, meanwhile, the people in the warehouses aren't even being told one or more people have coronavirus, so they wouldn't walk off the job or go home or be concerned about their own health and well-being. And not just their own health, but their family's health, their community's health, and then the health of the larger public, because the drivers are going out into every neighborhood. And the workers, even the warehouse workers, are usually riding

public transportation, sometimes more than one means of public transportation. You know, in the New York warehouse alone, the Staten Island warehouse, workers returned home to every borough in New York City, which was the largest problematic city in the nation at that point. One Amazon employee claims he was fired in retaliation after staging a walkout in New York. All the managers at your facility were told that somebody had tested positive. It's like keep it on the hush, don't tell everybody. They don't want to cause a panic. They want to keep business operations running. It was crazy to me. The company says he was fired for violating a mandatory quarantine. That it informs employees who've come in close contact with co-workers who've tested positive, and directs them to stay in quarantine for two weeks with pay. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. As you're gathering this information, then what do you do next, Emily? You're hearing these terrible stories from warehouse workers. What do you decide to do once you hear from them? We, you know, our group, the climate justice group that we're part of internally, decided to send out an email to our email, our internal email list that has about 8,600 people on it.

Really connecting climate justice with the struggles that our warehouse colleagues were facing and asking them, we've gotten a petition from them asking for greater safety measures that we asked our email list to sign. And so Maren and I forwarded both of those emails to a different, I forwarded it to one email list, she forwarded it to another. And that was two weeks before we got fired because our group also decided to organize this panel discussion between warehouse workers and tech workers to really hear it from the people's mouths, experiencing it themselves, what is actually happening for warehouse workers to be able to speak openly and honestly. And we had a special guest speaker, Naomi Klein,

who's a renowned author and climate justice activist. The fact that the company was willing to risk the bad publicity of firing some very high-profile workers, knowing it would lead to a flurry of press coverage, speaks to the risk that this poses to the sort of limitless power the management has been amassing? Actually, so there's two actually prominent Canadians in this story, because Tim Bray is another one. But within a couple hours of it going out, there was a tremendous amount of interest and people wanted to be a part of this.

So not only though did Amazon go after and fire the both of us, they went in and deleted the calendar invite so that people who had accepted could no longer see it. And then those that had gone home for the weekend never got to see it in the first place. Can I ask you both, how'd you find out you got fired? Did they just call? Did they find out you got fired? Did they just call? How did that go down? For me, well, for both of us, we got email invites to Zoom meetings at 2.45 p.m. on Good Friday for a three o'clock meeting, you know, that same day. So 15 minute warning. The call was extremely short. The HR person said are you recording i said no she said you have been warned in the past for breaking the external communications policy you've continued to break

policies including the no solicitation policy and in doing so you have chosen to end your employment at amazon effective immediately you know we'll send you a box for your Amazon assets. And I'm ending this call. It was 30 seconds. My 15 year career at Amazon ended in 30 seconds. I was just shaking because I was so blindsided. I, you know, I didn't know what I had done because I had done nothing. So as you said, Lauren, Amazon says you both, both you and Emily violated the internal policies, which includes its policy against solicitation,

which essentially forbids Amazon workers from asking co-workers to donate to causes or sign petitions. So, Emily, what do you make of that reasoning? As Tim Bray said, who is the VP, Canadian VP in Vancouver, B.C., said in his resignation blog post in protest of Amazon firing whistleblowers, he called the justification for our firings laughable. Bray wrote in a blog post, quote, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant in effect signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

You know, Tim, well, you know this well, Tim Bray also said that, and this was his quote, that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible or fungible units of pick and pack potential, only that it's not Amazon. It's how 21st century capitalism is done. So when you hear that, Maren, what does that make you think about? I just think that sadly, that is absolutely true. You know, it's Amazon isn't alone. We were we were trying to work with Amazon because that's where we had the most leverage. But obviously, we're seeing the same problems with Whole Foods and Instacart and even, you know, frontline

health care workers. So there's really something systemically wrong, definitely in the United States and to some extent across the world, with the way we treat and value the frontline workers that we are now realizing and calling essential. realizing and calling essential. And we need to take a very hard look at that as a society, because COVID is just a drill. Climate change is already upon us and the events and the challenges that climate change will be presenting in the next few years will be very similar to COVID. You know, Maureen, you mentioned the frontline workers being the most vulnerable. And I'm not sure what the situation is with Amazon in the United States, but just recently here in Canada, the incentives that they gave employees, the extra $2 an hour in double overtime to work so hard during this pandemic that that's ending at the end of this month. Yeah, it's happening similarly here in the United States. And I think it is such a tragedy and an injustice because I feel like, you know, COVID forced Amazon and some other companies to raise the bar as far as how we

are treating these essential workers, and to raise it to a point that it should have been at all along. What's a big takeaway? Because there are those out there who won't be surprised to hear that a big Goliath like Amazon allegedly doesn't treat many of its employees very well. And there are others just saying, what'd you expect? You spoke out against a company. Of course, you were going to get fired. What's the big takeaway from this story for each of you? Like, this has had such a ripple effect. So, you know, Tim Bray, a VP at Amazon, resigns over this. He gives up a million dollars and the best job that he's ever had, according to his blog post. And you have nine U.S. senators inquiring around Amazon's firing of whistleblowers.

A number of senators, including Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, saying we write today to strongly urge you to prioritize the health, safety and well-being of your employees. And then you have 15 attorneys general that follows that also inquiring around retaliation for workers. And this just wasn't just Maren and I. These were warehouse workers that were also fired for speaking out. We need to treat each person as if their life mattered and to stand with each other because this is the time requires it of us. I expect we'll hear more from both of you on this. I appreciate your time. Thank you to both of you. Thank you so much. now we did reach out to amazon for a statement about the allegations surrounding the firings of emily cunningham and maran costa but we didn't receive a response. In previous statements, Amazon has stated that the workers in questions were not fired for speaking up, but for, quote, violating internal

policies. A spokesperson added that Amazon supports, quote, every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies. I should also add that when Jeff Bezos announced those first quarter earnings I mentioned at the top of the show, he said that between April and June, Amazon would spend $4 billion on, quote, COVID-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe. That's it for FrontBurner. We'll talk again tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.