Amazon employees criticize company over climate change, say they're risking termination
Jeff Bezos announced in September a corporate climate pledge to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years early
Hundreds of Amazon employees criticized the company's steps to combat climate change "in protest to Amazon's newly updated external communications policy" and said they were risking termination.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice on Sunday posted critiques of Amazon from employees and identified them by name and job title.
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"Amazon participates in the global economy, where it has a substantial impact on many issues," principal engineer Michael Sokolov said in the post. "Expecting its employees to maintain silence on these issues, and Amazon's impact on them, is really a reprehensible overreach, and I am proud to take this opportunity to demonstrate my unwillingness to comply."
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMZN | AMAZON.COM INC. | 198.38 | -4.50 | -2.22% |
An Amazon spokesperson told FOX Business that employees "are welcome to engage constructively with any of the many teams inside Amazon that work on sustainability and other topics."
"[We] do enforce our external communications policy and will not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company or the hard work of their colleagues who are developing solutions to these hard problems," the spokesperson said.
In September, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a corporate climate pledge to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years early.
A crowd of demonstrators gathers outside of City Hall during the Global Climate Strike in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Friday, Sept. 20, 2019. (Chloe Collyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The announcement came one day before nearly 1,550 Amazon employees linked to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said they planned to walk out of the Seattle headquarters to protest the company's climate policies.
The climate justice group is not totally satisfied with the company's pledge.
"The company agreed to publish its carbon footprint for the first time last year and, in September, in response to thousands of employees walking out, announced plans to be net carbon zero by 2040," the group said in a press release. "However, employees called for Amazon to achieve zero emissions by 2030, which climate scientists say is necessary to halt catastrophic warming, not net zero by 2040."
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"Amazon has also rejected the employees’ demand to stop providing fossil fuel companies with machine learning technology to accelerate oil and gas extraction," the group wrote. "And in October, Amazon began warning employees that speaking out further would risk termination."
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice wants the company to commit to zero emissions by 2030, stop developing Amazon Web Services products for the oil and gas industry and "end funding of climate-denying politicians, lobbyists, and think tanks."
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FOX Business' Paul Conner contributed to this report.
