Earlier this month five current Amazon employees publicly called on the Seattle City Council to regulate its data centers. It was an unprecedented act of support from tech workers, and now three of them say they are under internal investigation for allegedly representing themselves as company spokespersons without prior approval. “This is a completely absurd claim,” says one of the workers involved, Patrick Schloesser. “This is patently absurd.”
Three software engineers who work at different Amazon sites and all live in Seattle believe they are being unfairly targeted for expressing their political beliefs. They filed a joint complaint Thursday with the Seattle Office for Civil Rights, according to employees and a filing seen by WIRED. They accused Amazon of illegal intimidation and retaliation for expressing personal opinions outside of work about the need to regulate the environmental and social impact of data centers.
“Seattle is one of the few jurisdictions in the country that prohibits private employers from discriminating against their employees based on their political beliefs and the organizations they belong to,” says Abby Lawlor, an attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt who advises the workers. “Here we have the legal tools to fight back and ensure that tech workers are fully democratic participants in these important local discussions. We hope the City of Seattle will do what it can to ensure this important Seattle law is enforced.”
Amazon and the Seattle Office of Civil Rights did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokeswoman, previously told WIRED that the company respects workers’ right to express their opinions and strives to be responsible stewards of the communities where it operates.
Amazon employees took to the city’s podium to speak out in favor of various regulations Seattle is considering imposing on data centers. Amazon does not currently have a planned data center in the city, but several other companies have unveiled plans for modern projects.
The workers who say they are under investigation – Darius Irani, Liesel Wigand and Schloesser – say each of them was summoned individually to virtual meetings with an Amazon employee relations officer last Wednesday. They have been told the investigation could take one to two weeks and have not yet received any updates, other than being instructed to utilize a speaker registration form, which they say does not address the personal comments they have made. Schloesser recalls being told that the investigation could result in his dismissal.
The three workers say Amazon seeks both to silence collective worker action, including in its warehouses, and to avoid public criticism of its data centers by using non-disclosure agreements and other tactics to shield projects from some scrutiny. Affected employees say they have received numerous expressions of support from co-workers and have received no internal criticism, outside of meetings with HR.
In remarks made during public comments at three town meetings this month, workers identified themselves as members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a collective of thousands of current and former employees of the tech giant that has long advocated for the company to better address its role in contributing to climate change.
The employees did not represent that they were speaking on behalf of the company, which, to their knowledge, has not provided any formal comments on the data center measure in question. Two other Amazon workers who spoke at later city council meetings say they were not notified that they were being investigated.