In a Withering Blog Post, Tim Bray Announces He’s Leaving His VP-Level Position at Amazon ⇥ tbray.org

Tim Bray was, until Friday, a VP at Amazon Web Services. But he left that position due to Amazon’s poor treatment of warehouse workers and whistleblowers:

On the other hand, Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety. I actually believe this: I have heard detailed descriptions from people I trust of the intense work and huge investments. Good for them; and let’s grant that you don’t turn a supertanker on a dime.

But I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.

Bray is a tech industry legend; his employment at Amazon arguably gave them as much credibility as it gave him. It’s not every day that someone with such stature and ranking within a company feels compelled to give that up to write so freely.