If you look at allyship as some sort of contest, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been eager to put some points on the board. Heโs done this mostly through highly publicized, โspicyโ responses to racist customers, and by canceling his meetings on Juneteenth and encouraging other employees โto do the same if you can.โ
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But Amazonโs black workers say Bezosโ record on addressing racial issues at his company leaves a lot to be desired, according to a new report from The New York Times. Bezosโ Juneteenth email provides a prime example: as the richest man in the world urged his employees to reflect on systemic racism, his black employeesโmany of whom work at Amazonโs fulfillment facilitiesโcouldnโt simply clear their schedules that day. And unlike other major retailers like Target and Nike, Amazon didnโt offer Juneteenth as a company-wide, paid holiday.
But the issues with Amazon go much deeper than paid holidays. For example, Amazon has been hostile to efforts to unionizeโand Black employees, particularly Somali immigrants in the companyโs Minneapolis warehousesโhave been instrumental in this effort. The fact that fair labor practices could be a racial justice issue seems to elude Amazonโs senior management.
In fact, as the Times points out, employees have directly flagged Amazonโs problems with racial inequality and bias directly to Bezos and other members of his senior team:
In April, before George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, a group of midlevel employees wrote to Mr. Bezos and his senior team, saying there was โa systemic pattern of racial bias that permeates Amazon,โ according to emails viewed by The New York Times. They said they were prompted to write after a leak of meeting notes showed that David Zapolsky, Amazonโs general counsel, had called a black warehouse employee in Staten Island โnot smart or articulate.โ
Mr. Zapolsky had said his comments were โpersonal and emotionalโ and that he did not know the employee was black. But in their email, the corporate employees said it โwas not an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of a bigger problem.โ
They said Amazon adopted the entrenched racism that plagued America, evidenced by the โhomogeneityโ of the its leadership compared with โthe rich racial and ethnic diversity amongst our hourly worker population.โ
One example of Amazon failing to respond to the concerns and needs of Black employees involves racist graffiti that has been scrawled into the bathrooms of its Los Angeles warehouse since last year. Johnnie Corina, who filed a discrimination complaint against Amazon last week, said he reported the hate speech several times to the company, but to his knowledge Amazon never launched an investigation into the incidents. Nor did the company address the graffiti with workers, or say the behavior was unacceptable (Amazon denies this, saying it addressed warehouse employees about โunacceptable graffitiโ in December and February and began investigating the hate speech in June, perhaps after reflecting on the importance of Juneteenth or something).
As a result of the companyโs inaction, Corina said he didnโt feel safe going back to work.
โTo not do any interventions is really not a safe environment for a black person,โ he told the Times.
Whatever energy Amazon lacked in addressing racist hate speech, it more than made up for it in firing a black janitorial contractor who shared images of the graffiti on social media. Donald Archie, who worked at the same LA warehouse as Corina, recently filed a complaint against the company for terminating him after he posted a photo of the racist words on Twitter.
Yes, you read that right. He wasnโt fired because Amazon thought he was responsible for the graffiti, but because he called it out.
Amazonโs response? Archie was fired for โnot escalating concerns about the graffiti and violating the companyโs cellphone use policy,โ the Times writes.
Sounds like youโve got some meetings on your horizon, Jeff.
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