Workers at Amazon criticize their own company on climate change

Online retail giant, Amazon was openly criticized for its record on climate change by more than 300 of its own employees. This was a huge career risk for the employees, as it clearly violates their company’s policy. It could lead to the employees having to lose their jobs.

The employees’ names and job titles were signed to statements on a blog post on Medium. Sarah Tracy, a software development engineer at Amazon, said “It’s our moral responsibility to speak up, and the changes to the communications policy are censoring us from exercising that responsibility”. An advocacy group founded by amazon workers, Amazon employees for Climate justice, had received letters from the company threatening to fire its employees.

The global e-commerce site, Amazon ships packages all over the world and this has an enormous carbon footprint because of the company’s reliance on fossil fuels to power its planes, trucks and vans.

CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, had received letters last year from more than 8,000 employees demanding that the company worked on reducing its carbon emissions and put an end to its use of fossil fuels. Amazon had already pledged to become net zero carbon by 2040 and use 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.