Amazon illegally retaliated against three of its employees for publicly testifying that Seattle should regulate data centers, according to a complaint filed on Thursday with the city’s Office for Civil Rights.
The complaint was filed on the workers’ behalf by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an independent group of corporate employees at Amazon that since 2018 has organized around climate issues.
It said the company started investigations and told the employees that they could face discipline, in one case up to potential termination, in an act of intimidation that violated the city’s civil rights protections against discrimination for political beliefs.
Five Amazon tech workers affiliated with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice testified at several different hearings before the Seattle City Council and two of its committees.
Their testimony in the company’s hometown drew national attention, and it put the tech giant in the awkward position of responding to public criticism of data centers and artificial intelligence from its own employees.
Patrick Schloesser, who has worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services since 2020, said in an interview with The New York Times that Amazon told him he was under investigation last week, when he was called into a meeting with no notice.
He had testified at two City Council hearings in early June. “I had this rising sense of anger that Amazon is attempting to infringe on my rights to speak out politically in my city,” he said.
“If we allow corporations to decide which speech is or is not allowed, that absolutely hurts democracy. ” Amazon said that, similar to many companies, it had policies against employees speaking as representatives of the company without approval.
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