Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm, said the firings were “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said on Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the recent firings of workers who had raised questions about workplace safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
Tim Bray, an engineer who had been a vice president of Amazon Web Services, wrote in a blog post that his last day at the company was on Friday. He criticized a number of recent firings by Amazon, including that of an employee in a Staten Island warehouse, Christian Smalls, who had led a protest in March calling for the company to provide workers with more protections.
Mr. Smalls’s firing has drawn the scrutiny of New York State’s attorney general.
Mr. Bray also criticized the firing last month of two Amazon employees, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who circulated a petition in March on internal email lists that called on Amazon to expand sick leave, hazard pay and child care for warehouse workers. They had also helped organize a virtual event for warehouse employees to speak to tech workers at the company about its workplace conditions and coronavirus response.
Mr. Bray, who had worked for the company for more than five years, called the fired workers whistle-blowers, and said that firing them was “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
“I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison,” he wrote.
