How the American Worker Got Fleeced

For decades, bosses have held down wages, cut benefits, and stomped on employees’ rights. Call it what it is: A heist

- Josh Eidelson

Amazon.com Inc. fired Emily Cunningham a little before the end of Good Friday, though the human resources rep put it a little differently. “You have ended your relationship with Amazon,” Cunningham recalls being told an hour after her company email account stopped working. She’d been a software engineer at the Seattle headquarters for seven years. The HR rep didn’t cite any deficiencies in her work but said she’d violated company policies. According to Amazon, she’d been breaking its rule against “solicitations.” Cunningham says that’s a policy ignored on a daily basis when it comes to things like selling Girl Scout Cookies in the office.

Neither Cunningham nor fellow software engineer Maren Costa, a 15-year Amazon employee fired the same day, were big in the Thin Mints game. But both had been challenging the company’s Covid-19 safety policies and mobilizing others to join them. They’d urged their white-collar colleagues to rally behind Amazon warehouse workers who’d gone on strike to demand stronger protective measures. Cunningham had just sent an email to an internal listserv condemning the treatment of worker Chris Smalls, fired the day he led a strike over safety in his New York City warehouse. In the email, Cunningham noted that U.S. law and Amazon’s own policies recognize employees’ right to communicate about conditions at their workplaces, which very much included precautions against the coronavirus pandemic sweeping through the country.