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| Amazon is frequently criticized over its carbon footprint due to its road transport network and server farms for its cloud computing activities (AFP Photo/INA FASSBENDER) |
San
Francisco (AFP) - Hundreds of Amazon employees Sunday openly criticized the
online retail giant's environmental record, defying the company's
communications policy.
More than
300 signed a Medium blog post by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ),
which is pushing the company to go further in its climate change mitigation
plan announced in September.
Group
members have publicly criticized the company, and some have been warned that
they could be fired.
"The
protest is the largest action by employees since Amazon began threatening to
fire workers for speaking out about Amazon's role in the climate crisis,"
the AECJ said.
"As
Amazon workers, we are responsible for not only the success of the company, but
its impact as well," said Sarah Tracy, a software development engineer at
Amazon.
"It's
our moral responsibility to speak up, and the changes to the communications
policy are censoring us from exercising that responsibility."
It is
common for companies to demand restraint from employees when it comes to
publicly discussing the firm's activities and even more so when openly
questioning them.
While the
environment and climate change was the focus of many of the posts on Sunday,
Amazon was also criticized for other activities such as providing artificial
intelligence capabilities to companies in the oil sector.
Amazon,
which in December said its workforce had hit 750,000, is often criticized over
its carbon footprint because of the high energy consumption of its huge server
farms for its lucrative cloud computing activities.
And it has
built its success on the back of a huge road transport logistics network to
ensure speedy deliveries, which generates a lot of greenhouse gases, the main
culprit in climate change.
Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos on September 19 last year made public environmental
commitments, promising in particular that the firm would be carbon neutral by
2040.
The AECJ
said this was insufficient and that Amazon should be aiming for a 2030 target.
"This
is not the time for silencing voices. We need policies that welcome more open
discourse, more problem-solving, and more urgent and concerted action about
climate change and its causes," said Mark Hiew, a senior marketing manager
at Amazon.
Responding
to the letter, an Amazon spokesperson defended its policy on public statements
about the company.
"While
all 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 company said.
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