Email Subject: [ACTION] Is it fair to silence Amazon employees who speak up?

We sent the following email on Monday, January 20, 2020. To read the quotes collected from Amazon employees, click here.

Hi fellow Amazon employees,

You may have read the news about Amazon threatening to fire a few people for violating the newly updated external communications policy by speaking publicly about Amazon’s impact on the climate crisis.

The international scientific community agrees that the climate crisis is an existential one for human civilization: it implicates us all, not only as employees, but as citizens and human beings. Don’t get us wrong: some comms policies make a ton of sense (i.e. for confidential projects). But allowing a corporation to silence us on its contribution to the climate crisis is a clear overreach of comms policy, and effectively demands we give up our basic humanity and integrity in order to be employees. And, it’s not just about climate: it’s also about our ability to speak up on other issues like racism and sexism in tech, treatment of warehouse workers, donations to anti-LGBTQ politicians, and complicity with ICE.

Our strength is in numbers. The idea is to intentionally break the communications policy so prolifically that it is unenforceable. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Here’s the plan. Add your name to your choice of several prewritten, intentionally-policy-violating quotes (or write your own), and then we’ll publish all the quotes in a Medium post. Quotes can be critical or complimentary, because either way violates the policy. Over fifty people have already submitted a quote. Will you join us? We won’t publish any quotes until we have at least 100.

If you’re willing — and we can only succeed in this together — just go to our quote collection page to get started here: Let’s speak up together.

Thanks for reading,

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice

PS Please share with your colleagues and teams!