Amazon VP and XML Co-Creator Quits Over Company Firing Warehouse Workers – “Victims Weren’t Abstract Entities but Real People”
Amazon Web Services VP, Tim Bray, has quit his job at the e-commerce giant “in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19,” Bray said in a scathing blog post. He was with the company for over five years and five months and held the title of Distinguished Engineer at AWS. Bray previously worked for Google and Sun Microsystems. He is also one of the creators of XML.
Bray named warehouse workers Chris Smalls and Bashir Mohammed, and tech employees Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who had criticized the company’s policies and were then fired. The warehouse workers had pushed the company to treat workers better, seeking paid time off for those who needed to self-quarantine or felt sick, along with demanding the closure of warehouses for sanitization where workers had tested positive for the virus. Those in tech had spoken against the company’s climate policies, and then supported the warehouse workers’ demands.
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“That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised.
