When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about the data centers, they began their testimony by citing a city law that prohibits job discrimination based on political speech. Now, they are accusing their employer of violating that law by retaliating against them.
On June 10th – one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a landmark decision to stop the data centers – Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called to an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s “Employee Relations.” HR representatives told the employees that the company was investigating them and that there could be disciplinary action, including dismissal. On Thursday, the three filed a formal complaint asking the Seattle Office of Civil Rights to investigate the matter, saying Amazon is engaging in illegal employment discrimination.
“I’m not willing to accept the reality that Amazon or any organization can silence me from exercising my rights,” Schloesser said. The Verge in the conversation. “We will not go back in line.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news comes shortly after Seattle officially announced a one-year moratorium on large data centers, introducing new proposals while council members consider legislation to give the city additional benefits and request research on data center effects on land use, public health, water use, jobs, utility rates, city infrastructure, and more. Earlier this month, many local residents attended Seattle City Council hearings in support of the data center regulations and freezes. Five Amazon employees — including Schloesser, Irani and Wigand — were among them.
The five are all members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), a group of current and former employees dedicated to the climate crisis. Last year, the group published an open letter signed by more than a thousand Amazon employees that urged Amazon to power all of its data centers with 100 percent more, local renewable energy.
Schloesser says that when he got the cold call through Zoom, he was less than half an hour into a design review meeting, where he was scheduled to show a bunch of people the project he’d been working on for months. He answered a call to find an HR representative, who asked Schloesser where he was and what he said at the City Council meeting — and he immediately had “the horrible feeling that this is not a safe place for me.” Schloesser said it sounded like the representative was “trying to get me to agree to something,” especially because of the lack of notice. He recalled the representative saying he violated Amazon’s corporate communications policy, which prohibits acting as an Amazon spokesperson without prior approval. But Schloesser, like other Amazon employees who testified at City Council hearings, identified himself as his role and membership in the AECJ — not, he said, as “a software engineer at Amazon.”
Schloesser said she felt “nervous” after the meeting. He added, “We all used this feeling of outrage and anger after everything we’ve been through at this company, and after making a non-controversial statement when we exercised our political speech rights as workers in the city of Seattle.”
Irani told The Verge that you received an email from HR on June 9, with an event on the calendar the next day to discuss a “confidential” matter. He said the representative asked about other Amazon employees attending City Council meetings and that he felt like they were “waiting for me to admit that I did something wrong.”
“I left this meeting feeling sad and unsure of myself, but after talking to two other members of the AECJ who gave evidence, to find out that they faced the same experience, then I started to get angry – because all I was doing was sharing my opinion that AI and data centers should be regulated,” said Irani.
The complaint filed Thursday says Amazon violated Seattle’s law and asks that the Office of Civil Rights “investigate these allegations and take all actions necessary to remedy any unlawful discrimination by Amazon.”
Abby Lawlor, an AECJ attorney and attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, said in a statement that Seattle “is one of the few places in the country that prohibits private employers from discriminating against their employees based on their political beliefs and affiliations. This protection gave AECJ members the confidence to speak before AIgu’s City data center and Seattle data center prohibits what Amazon is doing now—investigating them.” and threatening their employment as a direct result of their representation.”
“Amazon’s attempts to intimidate our members is unfair and discriminatory,” AECJ spokeswoman Eliza Pan said in a statement. “It’s an abuse of our democracy and the rule of law. Tech workers need to be able to speak up and act on their beliefs so CEOs can’t just ride all over us to get what they want. Amazon can’t be allowed to intimidate its workers and we should all be concerned if they succeed.”
Irani said he has closely followed data center construction around the country and believes, as many people testified at City Council hearings, that the benefits go mostly to tech companies and not local people.
“I am very angry about the way communities have been excluded and are facing many consequences and injuries caused by the way this construction was done,” he said. “Communities must have a say in how [data center] infrastructure is distributed. So I was proud to witness.”
Two months before the Seattle City Council voted to suspend, four unidentified companies had submitted proposals for five large data centers within the city limits, which would, when combined, have an electricity demand equal to one-third of Seattle’s typical usage on a given day — and would use 10 times the power of the city’s current data center, according to The Seattle Times.
Nationwide outrage over the construction of large data centers has increasingly made headlines in recent months, with complaints including noise levels, water consumption, rising local electricity costs, and more. The issue has particularly affected the Seattle metropolitan area, where Amazon and Microsoft are both headquartered.
Schloesser said the retaliation for his speech was not a complete surprise to him. “A little while ago I saw this culture of fear that Amazon was doing – they did it with layoffs, they did it with performance improvement programs, they set our standards so we could compete with each other, quotas they don’t regret,” he said. “If you’re afraid of losing your job just doing the job you’re expected to do day in and day out, you’re very unlikely to be willing to step out of line and do anything resembling speech. Even if it’s legally protected speech.”
