Diana Cuervo moved from Brooklyn, NY, to Everett, Washington, just to take the job at the company’s Everett distribution plant where she endured months of abuse and insults from her supervisor, her suit alleges. “Latins suck. How is a Latin like you working here?” the suit alleges her supervisor told her. Cuervo also says that she was hired to “Checkmark the diversity box.”
After Cuervo approached her supervisor about the alleged abuse and said she was considering going to human resource, she was told it would do no good. “When I tried to talk about the situation they always say if you speak out you’re going to be fired,” she said. “They would say to me, ‘Human Resources doesn’t work for you. Human Resources works for Amazon.’”
Cuervo did file a complaint to HR and a few days later was fired, seven months after taking the job, she said. Amazon denied Cuervo’s allegations and said she was fired after violating Amazon’s workplace safety policies. She denies that she did anything wrong.
“It’s very clear that at Amazon that they don’t want people to complain to Human Resources because when people start talking to human resources or complain they get fired,” Cuervo said.