American labor officials reported that Amazon retaliated responded illicitly as it fired two workers who previously have spoken about the company’s warehouse safety and environment exercises.
The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) was inspecting a complaint by Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who assisted in managing the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The employees were fired last year in April.
The company described that it has totally disagreed with the investigation. On Monday, a spokesman of Amazon said that they support every worker’s right to criticize their employer’s working situations, but that doesn’t come with blanket immunity against the company’s internal rules, all of which are legal.
Fired employees repeatedly violated internal policies
He continued that the firm had terminated these workers not for talking openly about working circumstances, sustainability, or safety but rather, for consistently breaking internal policies.
The NLRB will come up with its own complaint in case if Amazon doesn’t handle the matter. Emily Cunningham described to a media firm, the New York Times, that it is moral success and really demonstrates that people are on the right side of the law.
Source: Web
According to online records, the labor agency has acquired above a dozen complaints accusing unfair retaliation by the company. Furthermore, officials are studying the cases to check if they merit a consolidated inspection into the company’s exercises.
The firm has a background for responding hostilely to labor activism and restricting its staff from talking openly about Amazon. The problem has attained new urgency because of the tensions brought by the pandemic, which in turn increase the business and advantage to the firm, while ramping up new health risks for warehouse employees.
Besides this, Amazon was hardly hit by strikes and several other maneuvers in Europe. The firm is dealing with its opening formal union drive in the United States since 2014. The attorney general of New York is even inspecting whether it illicitly retaliated against warehouse employees in the states who previously conducted protests during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The dispute exists with Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham (designers at Amazon) before the spread of the virus. They were operating in the firm that helped manage a strike at the company’s Seattle headquarters to push the firm to enhance its environmental practices in 2019.
Workers also pressured Amazon to make a policy to handle climate change in its yearly board summit for investors. And within the same year, Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) said that the company will aim to be powered by renewable energy by 2030.
