Tim Bray, a distinguished engineer and vice president at Amazon Web Services Inc., penned a blog post today announcing that he has quit over “Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.”

Bray is a prominent technologist who joined AWS in 2014 after a stint at Google LLC as Android developer advocate. He’s known for his contributions to a number of foundational internet specifications such as the XML and JSON data formats, which are widely used in development projects.

AWS parent Amazon.com Inc. drew scrutiny last month after firing user experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who had publicly criticized its labor policies. Costa told CNBC that Amazon had tried to undermine her efforts to organize video calls aimed at allowing tech employees “hear what it is like working in warehouses during the coronavirus” from warehouse employees. Amazon, in turn, told the network in a statement that Costa and Cunningham were let go after “repeatedly violating internal policies.”

Bray wrote in his blog post today that the firings are what led to his decision to leave. He accused Amazon of dismissing Costa and Cunningham over internal video calls featuring warehouse workers that were organized by AECJ, an employee group in which the two designers had leadership roles. 

“An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint,” Bray wrote today. “Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.”

At that point, Bray added, “I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.”

Bray did give Amazon a bit of praise for its recent efforts. “Amazon’s messaging has been urgent that they are prioritizing this issue and putting massive efforts into warehouse safety,” he wrote. “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.”

And as for AWS itself, Bray was considerably more complimentary. “It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization,” he wrote. “I genuinely admire its leadership.”

Bray’s high-profile resignation adds to the recent employee criticism of Amazon’s safety policies. On April 29, a group of workers from Amazon, Target Corp., Instacart operator Maplecart Inc. and other companies announced plans to stage a walkout over working conditions at warehouses amid the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon said last week that it expects to spend $4 billion or more this quarter on COVID-19-related expenses such as employee safety and online deliveries. 

An Amazon spokesperson said that “our top concern is ensuring the health and safety of our employees, and we expect to invest approximately $4 billion from April to June on COVID-related initiatives to get products to customers and keep employees safe. This includes spending more than $800 million in the first half of the year on COVID-19 safety measures, with investments in personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of our facilities, less efficient process paths that better allow for effective social distancing, higher wages for hourly teams, and developing our own COVID-19 testing capabilities, etc.”

Photo: Scott Lewis/Flickr