Standing up for the little guy
Tim Bray, now a former principal engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), resigned last Friday (May 1st). He is now the most senior employee to speak out against the treatment of employees at Amazon. You can read his farewell to Amazon on his personal webpage here. I'll include some quotes in this post, but his writing is really worthwhile if you have the time.
This all came to pass when colleagues of Bray's were fired following their criticism of Amazon's treatment of their warehouse employees. Two, now former, user experience designers by the names of Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham were fired. Amazon states that this occured because the employees had repeatedly violated internal policies, but Bray and others seem to see through this statement. Bray said in his blog that 'it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing'. He strongly states how 'the victims aren't abstract entities, but real people' and offers alternative options that Amazon had in this situation. The company could have '...objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.’ The event which Bray is referring to was a video call that was being organized to feature the stories of warehouse workers and an appearance by Canadian activist, Naomi Klein. Costa and Cunningham were promoting this event as well as this petition demanding better coronavirus protection for warehouse workers.
Bray doesn't think that the media has done the best job covering the stories of the warehouse employees either. He mentions Christian Small, the employee who was at the start of much of the press coverage regarding Amazon's employee treatment during COVID-19. Small worked in Staten Island at the JFK8 fulfillment center and was fired shortly after he organized the first in a series of walk-out strikes at his building. It was leaked later, in early April, that Amazon planned to utilize a smear campaign against Small, calling him 'not smart or articulate'. I have previous blog posts that tell more of the employee uprising story here, here, here and here . Clearly, this issue is something that I am very passionate about myself!
It is important to note that Bray claims to believe Amazon when they say that they are trying to be better, stating that 'you don't turn a supertanker on a dime'. But he also points out something that I have been saying all along - you can't just treat employees as numbers in the business. I will admit, he presents it much more eloquently when he writes 'Amazon treats humans in the warehouses as fungible units or pick-and-pack potential....[the company] has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power.' Bray also acknowledges that his specific sector of AWS in Seattle treated its workers humanely - they are paid well and could easily leave and get a similar job across the street if they were unhappy. He has taken the action of resignation because he believes that staying 'would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions that [he] despised', even if he wasn't directly connected to them.
My favorite quote I pulled from Bray's blog post was probably this - 'It is evidence of a vein of toxicity running through company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.' This idea that company culture is an important factor isn't new. In fact, a 2015 article from Harvard Business Review wrote about how company culture is connected to employee motivation. This makes me ask - if we've known about the issues of culture for so long, why hasn't anything been done? Bray makes a point that massive companies need to make change slowly, but five years is a lot of time with seemingly minimal progress. The author of the HBR article states that 'culture tends to feel like some magic force that few know how to control' and this elusive nature might also contribute to the hestiation of many to try to change it.
The research that supported the 2015 HBR article dates back to the 1980s when researchers at the University of Rochester came up with a framework of six main factors why people work. They are:
- Play
- Purpose
- Potential
- Emotional Pressure
- Economic Pressure
- Inertia
The first three tend to help an employee's performance on the job while the latter three hurt it. Play occurs when one is motivated by the work itself. For instance, a teacher at play enjoys the core activities of teaching, such as class planning. Purpose refers to when the direct outcome of work fits with your identity. A teacher driven by purpose values the goal of educating children. Potential is when the outcome of your work benefits your identity. This means the work enhancing your potential, such as a teacher who might want to one day become a principal. All of these reasons to work tend to encourage employees and enhance their overall performance.
On the other hand, the last three factors can hinder an individual's performance. Emotional pressure occurs when work becomes some external force that threatens your identity. This might be when you accept a job to avoid dissappointing yourself or others, such as following in a parent's footsteps when it is really not what you wish to do. Economic pressure is when an external force makes you work. You work to gain a reward (paycheck) or to avoid a punishment (eviction). Your motivation to work is seperate from the work and seperate from your identity. Many of the warehouse employees at Amazon may fall into this category as they continue to come into work, putting their health in danger, because they need the wage to care for others and pay bills. Lastly, inertia is when the motive is so removed from the work and your identity that you can't tell why you are working anymore. An example of this is an individual who says they are working just because it's what they did yesterday and what they have always done. Individuals who work for these three reasons are no longer thinking about the work, but instead are thinking about dissappointments, rewards, or that the work is just what you do. I don't know about anyone else, but these all sound incredibly debilitating to me.
As I've written before, employees that are healthy, happy and supported by their employers tend to be the most productive versions of themselves. Company culture is a HUGE factor in how employees feel while in the workplace. The current situation with Amazon, where there is a culture of fear fits into all three of the negative reasons to work, without including many positives. Or whatever positives are in existance are being overshadowed by the negative at this time. I firmly believe that no company is a lost cause when it comes to this. What we need, as a society, is more action from individuals like Tim Bray. We need upper leadership and those with social capital to take a stand for those below them, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because in the long-run, research has shown that it is a smart business move for companies. This refers to ALL companies, not just the ones currently being called out by the media. I hope to see more action being taken in the near future and more discussions surrounding how real sustainable changes can be made to improve culture within companies.
-Vicky
Sources (linked to articles):
Vice and Vice
Harvard Business Review
CNBC
"Bye Amazon" - Tim Bray's Blog
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