Amazon employees say they face termination for supporting data center caps

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings on data centers, they began their testimony by citing a city law prohibiting employment discrimination based on political speech. Now, they accuse their employer of violating this law by retaliating against them.

On June 10th – one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council approved a resolution Moratorium In the data centers – Patrick Schlosser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were summoned to an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s Employee Relations. Human resources representatives told employees that the company was investigating them, and said there could be disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment. On Thursday, the three filed a legal complaint asking the Seattle Office for Civil Rights to investigate the matter, alleging that Amazon engaged in prohibited employment discrimination.

“I am not willing to accept a reality in which Amazon or any company can silence me from exercising my rights,” Schlosser said. Edge In an interview. “We will not back down from class.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The news comes shortly after Seattle Officially released A one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers, rolling out new proposals while council members consider legislation to give the city more benefits and Research request About the data center’s impacts on land use, public health, water use, jobs, utility rates, city infrastructure, and more. Earlier this month, several local residents attended Seattle City Council hearings in support of the data center regulations and moratorium. Among them were five Amazon employees – including Schlosser, Irani, and Wiegand.

All five are members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), a group of current and former employees dedicated to the climate crisis. Last year, the group published Open letter It was signed by more than 1,000 Amazon employees urging Amazon to power all of its data centers with 100 percent additional domestic renewable energy.

Schlosser says that when he received the Zoom cold call, he was less than a half-hour away from a design review meeting, where he was scheduled to show dozens of people a project he had been working on for months. He responded to the call to find a human resources representative, who asked Schlosser where he was and what he said at the City Council meeting — and immediately got “an alarming sense that this is not a safe place for me.” Schlosser said he felt like the actor “was trying to get me to confess to something,” especially because of the lack of notice. He noted that the actor said he violated Amazon’s communications policy, which prohibits serving as an Amazon spokesperson without prior approval. But Schlosser, like other Amazon employees who testified at the City Council hearings, identified himself only through his role and membership in the AECJ — not, say, as an “Amazon software engineer.”

Schlosser said he felt “kind of terrified” after the meeting. “We all tapped into this feeling of indignation and anger after everything we’ve been through at this company, and after making a non-controversial statement where we are simply exercising our rights to speak out politically as City of Seattle employees,” he added.

Iranian said Edge He received an email from HR on June 9, including a calendar event for the next day to discuss a “confidential” matter. He said the representative asked about other Amazon employees who attended the City Council hearings, and that he felt “they were waiting for me to admit that I did something wrong.”

“I left that meeting feeling disturbed and unsure of myself,” Irani said, “but after speaking with the two other members of the ECJ who testified, and finding that they had faced similar experiences, I started to feel angry – because all I was doing was sharing my opinion that AI and data centers should be regulated.”

The legal complaint filed Thursday alleges that Amazon violated Seattle law and asks the Office for Civil Rights to “investigate these allegations and take all necessary actions to address any unlawful discrimination committed by Amazon.”

Seattle is “one of the few jurisdictions in the country that prohibits private sector employers from discriminating against their employees based on the political beliefs they hold and the organizations they belong to,” Abby Lawlor, an AECJ attorney and attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, said in a statement. These protections have given AECJ members the confidence to speak out before the Seattle City Council in favor of local data center and AI regulation, and they prohibit exactly what Amazon is doing now — investigating them. and threaten their employment as a direct result of their advocacy.”

“Amazon’s attempts to intimidate our members is an unfair and discriminatory employment practice,” AECJ spokeswoman Eliza Pan said in a statement. “It’s an abuse of our democracy and the rule of law. Tech workers should be able to speak and act on their beliefs so CEOs can’t push us all to get what they want. Amazon can’t be allowed to intimidate its employees, and we should all be concerned if they succeed.”

Irani said he closely follows data center construction across the country, and that he believes, as several people testified at City Council hearings, that the benefits go mostly to technology companies and not to local residents.

“It makes me really upset about how communities are being left out and facing a lot of consequences and damage from how this construction is being done,” he said. “Communities should have a say in how (data center) infrastructure is deployed. So I was proud to testify.”

Two months before the Seattle City Council voted on the moratorium, four little-known companies submitted proposals to create five large-scale data centers within city limits, which, combined, would have a maximum electricity demand equal to a third of Seattle’s average usage on a given day — and would use 10 times more energy than the city’s current number of data centers, according to Seattle Times.

Anger has been growing nationwide over the construction of giant data centers Increasingly to make Headlines In recent months, with complaints including noise levels, water use, rising local electricity costs, and more. The issue has drawn particular concern in the broader Seattle metropolitan area, where both Amazon and Microsoft are headquartered.

Schlosser said retaliation for speaking out didn’t come as a complete surprise. “Once I started, I was aware of the culture of fear that Amazon creates — they do it through layoffs, they do it through performance improvement plans, they set us up to compete against each other, and unfortunate attrition quotas,” he said. “If you’re afraid of losing your job just by doing the work you’re expected to do day in and day out, you’re unlikely to be willing to step out of line and do anything like speaking out. Even if your speech is legally protected.”