Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, one of the organizers of the walkout, has been critical of the company’s position on the environment and wants to bring attention to a “lack of trust in company leadership’s decision making.”
About half of the employees that were part of the walkout did so outside Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. The firm says it has 65,000 employees in Washington state and about 350,000 workers globally.
“Today looks like it might be the start of a new chapter in Amazon’s history, when tech workers coming out of the pandemic stood up and said we still want a say in this company and the direction of this company,” Eliza Pan, a cofounder of AECJ and a former program manager at Amazon, said the day of the walkout May 31. “We still want a say in the important decisions that affect all of our lives, and tech workers are going to stand up for ourselves, for each other, for our families, the communities where Amazon operates and for life on planet Earth.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said the company has been happy with its return-to-office policy. “We understand that it’s going to take time to adjust back to being in the office more and there are a lot of teams at the company working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible for employees,” Glasser said.