Tim Bray, a longtime senior engineer and VP at Amazon, has resigned over the company’s firing of whistleblowers who raised concerns about warehouse employees being put at risk of contracting COVID-19, saying in an open letter that staying on “would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised.”
“I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19,” he wrote in the letter. “What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.”
Despite that, Bray called Amazon’s actions “chickenshit” and said he couldn’t keep working for the company in good faith after Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two workers who called for better conditions, were fired on the spot. “Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time,” Bray wrote. “Instead, they just fired the activists. At that point I snapped.”
Cunningham took to Twitter to publicly thank Bray for speaking out.
Amazon VP, @timbray resigns over #covid firings of me, @marencosta and others.
Says Amazon “firing whistleblowers” is “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.”
Thank you, Tim.https://t.co/oShy4TQisN
— Emily Cunningham (@emahlee) May 4, 2020
As for what’s next for Bray? “I don’t know, genuinely haven’t taken time to think about it,” he writes. “I’m sad, but I’m breathing more freely.” You can read his letter in its entirety here.
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