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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

Amazon is trying to establish itself as the most essential of essential businesses during the coronavirus outbreak. But the tech giant is struggling to keep a lid on internal turmoil, both at its warehouses, where workers say they’re not being adequately protected from COVID-19, and at its corporate offices, where a showdown between tech employees and management over the company’s climate policies reached a tipping point last week.

Last Friday afternoon, Amazon fired two of its tech employees after they publicly criticized its coronavirus policies. Those employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both user experience designers with 21 years of service at the company between them, were among the leaders of an internal worker group formed in December 2018 with the aim of pressuring Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to commit to more ambitious climate targets. The group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), has recently widened its focus to embrace the struggles of frontline Amazon employees at fulfillment centers across the country.

Cunningham and Costa were fired after they wrote tweets criticizing the company for putting workers and the public at risk and offering to match up to $500 in donations to a fund for Amazon warehouse workers exposed to COVID-19.

In addition to firing Cunningham and Costa, AECJ says the company deleted an invitation to a virtual event that the worker group had sent to Amazon employees to allow them to “hear directly from Amazon warehouse workers as they talk honestly about the real problems they’re facing as well as solutions.”

The goal of the AECJ webcast, which was to feature author and climate justice activist Naomi Klein, was to explore questions like, “How are Covid-19, the climate crisis, and the struggles of warehouse workers connected? How are all of these issues tied to racism and inequity?” More than 1,000 employees had RSVPed to the event before it was taken down, AECJ said in a press release, adding that internal emails about the event had also been deleted by the company.

“Why is Amazon so scared of workers talking with each other? No company should punish their employees for showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic!” Costa said in a statement. She and Cunningham say they still plan to host the virtual event with a new RSVP link.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Amazon spokesperson Drew Herderner said, “We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”

AECJ has been publicly pushing Jeff Bezos to reduce the company’s contributions to climate change for more than a year now. In the summer of 2019, the group called on the company’s shareholders to adopt a climate change resolution that was ultimately backed by more than 8,700 Amazon workers. It was voted down, but a few months later, Bezos unveiled a climate plan that aimed for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade ahead of the deadline laid out in the Paris climate agreement. AECJ argued that the plan wasn’t comprehensive enough, and on September 20, in solidarity with the youth climate strikes happening all over the world, thousands of Amazon employees walked out of the company’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Around the same time, the company updated its communication policies to require employees to seek approval from management before speaking publicly about Amazon. In October, when two of its employees, Costa and Jamie Kowalski, publicly criticized one of company’s climate policies, telling the Washington Post that it “distracts from the fact that Amazon wants to profit in businesses that are directly contributing to climate catastrophe,” the employees were warned that speaking out again would result in “formal corrective action.”

In response, 400 Amazon employees risked their jobs to publicly speak out about the company’s climate policies. “We decided we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let a policy silence us in the face of an issue of such moral gravity like the climate crisis,” the group said in a tweet in January that has since been deleted.

It took a few months, but the company finally made good on its threat. Doesn’t look like the fired employees are going to stop speaking out anytime soon, though.

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Amazon fires employees who spoke out about coronavirus and climate change

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Apparently the World Just Wants the Trains to Run on Time

Mother Jones

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I seriously don’t have the courage to click on this link, so I’ll just share the tweet:

Looking for a silver lining? The US is moving toward authoritarianism slower than the other countries. And Germany, which has some recent experience with this sort of thing, remains pretty committed to elections and so forth.

Then again, Russia, Spain, and China have some recent experience with authoritarian governments too, and that’s not stopping them from losing faith in democracy.

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Apparently the World Just Wants the Trains to Run on Time

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Bay Area Police Sex Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder

Mother Jones

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This past Friday, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley announced that she would pursue charges against seven officers for conduct related to a sex scandal that has been roiling Bay Area law enforcement since March. The announcement came days after Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, who has compared the Oakland Police Department to a “frat house,” said she would recommend that the OPD fire one cop (three others have already resigned), suspend seven, and provide training and counseling to yet another. Officers with at least four other Bay Area agencies have been fired, reassigned, or have resigned over the scandal, which claimed three successive Oakland police chiefs in just nine days in June. Oh, and one other thing: The victim is AWOL. Here are the dirty details:

1. Crimes: Five current and former Oakland police officers, a former Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy, and a former Livermore cop are to be charged on 16 counts including oral copulation with a minor and engaging in prostitution—both felonies—and engaging in a lewd act in public. Two cops will be charged with unauthorized use of a police database: Celeste Guap, the 18-year-old at the heart of the scandal, alleged that officers gave her confidential information about her friends’ arrest histories—not to mention money, protection, and information about upcoming prostitution stings—in exchange for sex. Another officer will be charged with failure to report a crime. The DA’s investigation—which included interviews with Guap and various officers, and a review of more than 100,000 pages of social media posts and text messages—determined that two of the officers not charged with sex crimes did actually have sexual contact with Guap. But because those alleged contacts occurred outside of Alameda County, O’Malley’s office has no jurisdiction, she said Friday.

2. Punishments: An investigator with the Alameda County DA’s office who formerly worked for the OPD was fired in July. A Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy and an officer with the Livermore Police Department resigned earlier this year over their alleged connections with Guap. Two Richmond officers who were determined to have had sex with Guap when she was 18 were reassigned from positions where they regularly interacted with youth. The Livermore Police Department said on Saturday that it had concluded a criminal investigation, but several police agencies are still conducting investigations related to the scandal.

3. Complications: O’Malley’s office can’t formally charge or arrest any of the officers yet, because Guap is no longer in California. She’s in a Florida jail cell. Late last month, the alleged victim checked into a Stuart, Florida, sex-and-drug addiction program. Three days later, according to the East Bay Express, the local weekly that broke the scandal, Guap allegedly bit a security guard and was arrested, charged with aggravated battery, and jailed—bail was set at $300,000. The Richmond Police Department used victim’s compensation funds to help pay for Guap’s rehab—the Contra Costa County DA’s office told the Express that it helped process the application for the funds. Guap’s mother and attorney Pamela Price, who represents Guap, suspect a cover-up of some kind: They questioned why Guap wasn’t placed in a local program instead. This latest news has renewed calls by local activists for federal or state authorities to launch an independent investigation. On Friday, O’Malley said the Richmond police did not consult her before paying for Guap’s trip to Florida, and that she would not have approved such a trip. She can understand the public outcry over the decision, she added. The Martin County DA is expected to decide this week whether to pursue the charges against Guap.

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Bay Area Police Sex Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder

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How About If We All Get Back to Protecting and Serving?

Mother Jones

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My neighboring city of Costa Mesa may be thousands of miles from New York and much, much smaller (population: 112,000), but they have something in common: police unions that don’t seem to know when to quit. Check this out:

An Orange County Superior Court judge on Wednesday ordered a private investigator to stay away from two Costa Mesa councilmen he allegedly helped surveil in the run-up to local 2012 elections.

….The false-imprisonment charge relates to the filing of a police report that caused Councilman Jim Righeimer to be detained briefly when an officer responded to his home to perform a sobriety test, according to prosecutors….Scott Impola ‘s firm was retained by the Costa Mesa Police Assn. to surveil and research local councilmen who were trying to cut pension costs and reduce jobs at City Hall, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

As part of their work, Impola and private investigator Chris Lanzillo allegedly put a GPS tracker on Councilman Steve Mensinger’s car and later called in a false DUI report on Righeimer as he was leaving Skosh Monahan’s, a restaurant owned by fellow Councilman Gary Monahan.

….Prosecutors say they have no evidence that the police union knew of any illegal activity beforehand.

Well, yeah. No evidence. But there is this:

Costa Mesa police officers mocked members of the City Council and suggested ways to catch them in compromising positions in the run-up to the 2012 municipal election, according to emails contained in court documents reviewed Monday by the Daily Pilot.

…. In one message, the association’s then-treasurer, Mitch Johnson, suggested telling the union’s lawyer about two of the councilmen’s upcoming city-sponsored trip to Las Vegas….”I’m sure they will be dealing with other ‘developer’ friends, maybe a Brown Act violation or two, and I think Steve Mensinger is a doper and has moral issues,” Johnson wrote in an email from a private account. “I could totally see him sniffing coke off a prostitute. Just a thought.

Yes. “Just a thought.” I have a feeling that maybe the GPS and DUI revelations didn’t come as a big shock or anything when the union was confronted with them. There’s also this:

The association’s president at the time, Jason Chamness, told the grand jury that he asked the law firm to dig up dirt on certain City Council members because he believed they were corrupt. Shortly after the DUI report involving Righeimer, the union fired the law firm, although the affidavit notes the union continued to pay a retainer until as recently as January 2013.

During his testimony, Chamness also said he deleted emails from his private account, which he used to contact the law firm about union business.

And why did the police union hire these two goons? Because the city councilmen in question were trying to cut pension costs and reduce jobs at City Hall. How dare they?

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How About If We All Get Back to Protecting and Serving?

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