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You may have heard the story of the two Amazon employees who were fired for communicating about company policy without getting permission, so we thought we’d call them up. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa believe they were let go due to their activism against the climate change policy within the company. Both were involved in a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

“When we first met with Amazon in January of 2019, we had filed a shareholder resolution on climate change and asking Amazon to really take climate leadership, and when we first met with them in our capacity as both shareholders and as employees … they would not even be willing to give a date for releasing the carbon footprint,” Cunningham said. “And Amazon, at the time, out of the top 10 retailers, was the only one to not release its carbon footprint. So the bar was very, very low.”

“So you went from that point in January to like nine months later, we participate in a global climate strike, and the very next day Amazon announces the climate pledge. And then not too long after that, Bezos — after sustained pressure from employees for months and months — announces pledging $10 billion of his own personal wealth toward climate change.”

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Both employees believe they helped affect positive change with Amazon’s environmental policies. So what was ultimately the reason they were fired?

“Amazon will say we were fired for breaking the no solicitation policy. Two weeks prior to being fired, we both forwarded an email that had a link to a petition to support workers’ rights in this time of COVID. We didn’t get fired at that point, but then on April 10, our group — not me or Emily personally — but our group sent out an invitation to a live stream event we were planning to connect tech workers to warehouse workers, just be able to hear straight from warehouse workers what it was like for them in the warehouses during COVID,” Costa said.

“Within two hours of that invite going out, we had 1,000 accepts and 500 tentative, and Amazon fired Emily and I at 3 p.m. on that Friday and killed the email invite.”

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Cunningham said that employees violate the no solicitation policy all the time without even realizing it — like inviting coworkers to buy their kid’s Girl Scout Cookies, which she says no one gets in trouble for — so she believes this relates to their previous environmental activism.

“Because Maren and I have been so visible in the climate movement at Amazon … there are thousands of employees at Amazon who have been part of this movement around wanting and asking for climate leadership.”

Now that they’re no longer at Amazon, what’s next?

“I’ll always be working on climate no matter what I do. I’m still kind of reeling from it because it was stunning. They made it clear they wanted us gone in the past previously for speaking out about Amazon’s climate impact. But it was still quite shocking when it happened,” Cunningham said.

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