Tim Bray, Early Internet Guru, And Amazon VP Quits Over The 'Chickenshit' Company's Targeting Of Employees Speaking Out About COVID-19

Tim Bray, Early Internet Guru, And Amazon VP Quits Over The 'Chickenshit' Company's Targeting Of Employees Speaking Out About COVID-19

4 years ago
Anonymous $pSba0tWIcA

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200504/10502544429/tim-bray-early-internet-guru-amazon-vp-quits-over-chickenshit-companys-targeting-employees-speaking-out-about-covid-19.shtml

If you do anything internet related, hopefully you already know Tim Bray. Among tons of other things, he helped develop XML and a variety of other standards/technologies the internet relies on. He's also been a vocal and thoughtful commenter on a wide variety of issues, especially in the tech policy space. For the past five years he's been working at Amazon as a VP and Distinguished Engineer -- but as he's announced he has now quit in protest over the company's retaliation against workers who were speaking up over the company's handling of their working conditions during the pandemic. Bray gives some of the background of workers organizing and speaking up about their concerns, and then discusses the company's reaction (firing the vocal ones and offering lame excuses).

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting

a petition and

organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist

Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing

lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the

flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications

were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.