AMERICA—Senior Engineer and Vice President of Amazon Tim Bray has quit after he claims Amazon has been “firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.”

Bray mentions on his website:

“May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.”

Bray goes on to say many workers felt they were uninformed, unprotected, and frightened. Employees who began advocating for better working conditions were fired to which the former VP said,

“That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.”

He named the people who were affected by these firings as Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. Many of the employees at Amazon are said to be in fear for their health and well-being with the coronavirus affecting the globe, leading them to feel the company is not doing enough to protect them. There have been dozens of confirmed coronavirus cases at warehouses around the country.

Just last week, Amazon, Target, FedEx, Instacart, and Whole Foods workers went on strike to protest their working conditions. Bray adds a link to a YouTube video he believes is the reason two employees were fired. You can find it on his website https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/

In his resignation letter, Bray ended by saying, “I’m sad, but I’m breathing more freely.”

Bray has also previously worked for Google and graduated from the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. He returned in 2009 to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree.