Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits

Three Amazon software engineers have filed a legal complaint with the Seattle Office for Civil Rights, alleging the company retaliated against them after they testified before the City Council in favor of a data-center moratorium, citing a city law that bars employment discrimination over political speech [1]. The employees — Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand — are members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), a group that last year published an open letter signed by more than 1,000 Amazon workers urging the company to power all its data centers with 100 percent additional, local renewable energy [1]. On June 10th, one day after the Seattle City Council passed a one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers, each was called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s Employee Relations unit. HR representatives told them the company was investigating their conduct and warned that disciplinary action, up to and including termination, could follow [1]. “I am unwilling to accept a reality in which Amazon or any corporation can silence me in exercising my rights,” Schloesser said in an interview. “We’re not going to step back in line” [1]. AECJ spokesperson Eliza Pan called the company’s actions “an unfair and discriminatory employment practice” and “an abuse of our democracy and rule of law” [1]. Amazon, one of the five dominant Big Tech firms that together make up roughly a quarter of the S&P 500, has long faced scrutiny over its business practices [9]. Criticism has spanned anti-competitive behavior, treatment of workers, and environmental harm, according to a broad catalog of complaints documented over the company’s history [2]. The company is also a leading hyperscale cloud operator, building massive data-center campuses to support services such as AWS, which provides computing power to millions of customers [11]. The Seattle moratorium, which tables new large-scale data-center proposals while council members study effects on land use, public health, water use, and utility rates, arrived after four unknown companies submitted plans for five facilities that would have drawn a combined maximum electricity demand equal to one-third of Seattle’s average daily use — roughly 10 times the power consumed by the city’s existing data centers [1]. The broader metropolitan area, home to both Amazon and Microsoft, has seen intensifying public pushback over noise, water consumption, and rising local electricity costs tied to data-center expansion [1]. The legal complaint filed Thursday requests that the Office for Civil Rights investigate and remedy any unlawful discrimination [1]. Abby Lawlor, AECJ’s counsel, noted that Seattle is one of a limited number of U.S. jurisdictions that prohibit private employers from discriminating based on employees’ political beliefs and organizational affiliations [1]. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment [1].