Key Takeaway: Amazon Employees for Climate Justice will strike today at the company’s Seattle headquarters to demonstrate for a zero-emissions plan and demand their company cut ties with oil and gas companies and climate-denying political entities.
Amazon disrupted the retail world. Now, its employees want the Internet powerhouse to become a force in the fight against climate change.
Workers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and offices worldwide plan to walk off their jobs today, joining the Global Climate Strike to pressure world leaders who will meet next week at the 2019 Climate Action Summit in New York. Inspired by 16-year-old environmentalist Greta Thunberg, the campaign is pushing for an “energy revolution” that includes an end to burning fossil fuel. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the employee organization that arranged the initiative, is made up of 1,550 workers who have pledged to join the strike.
Amazon has responded with its own plan. On Thursday, the company unveiled “The Climate Pledge,” which calls for other companies to join Amazon in meeting the Paris Agreement by 2040, a decade ahead of the agreement’s goal. Companies that sign the pledge agree to implement decarbonizing strategies, measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis, and work toward permanently neutralizing remaining emissions.
As part of its pledge, Amazon vowed to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2040 and said it would invest $100 million to protect and restore forests. The company has also said it will purchase 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian.
“We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue — we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, said in a statement. “If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items a year — can meet the Paris Agreement ten years early, then any company can.”
Leaders at WordPress, Etsy, Kickstarter, and companies including online startups and outdoor clothing retailers, have signed a joint statement through the American Sustainable Business Council in support of the Global Climate Strike. Retailers such as Lush, Patagonia, and Ben & Jerry’s will close their shops and encourage employees to participate in the strike. These businesses and more than 100 others will also participate in the Digital Climate Strike, by “greening out” their sites and running full-page banners to promote the strike.
“AS EMPLOYEES OF ONE OF THE LARGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD, WE HAVE POWER. WE NEED TO PUSH FOR A CLIMATE PLAN THAT GETS US TO ZERO EMISSIONS COMPANY-WIDE BY 2030.”
Amazon’s workers have been looking for faster, bigger progress from the company. They have pushed Amazon to commit to zero emissions by 2030, to shift to electric vehicles, end cloud computing contracts with fossil fuel companies and cut funding to climate-denying think tanks, lobbyists and politicians. The Climate Pledge represents a monumental step toward the employee group’s goals.
“As employees of one of the largest companies in the world, we have power,” Bobby Gordon, a finance manager at Amazon in Seattle and spokesperson for the Amazon employees, told Karma. “We need to push for a climate plan that gets us to zero emissions company-wide by 2030.”
90 Companies Create Most Emissions
Climate change, if left unchecked, may pose an threat to life on earth, according to the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, Australia. Switzerland last month joined countries including the U.K., France and Sweden in targeting zero emissions by 2050.
The majority of emissions worldwide have been produced by just 90 companies, according to the Carbon Majors Report. Of these, 50 are publicly traded, including Chevron, Shell and Peabody, while the others are state-owned or government-run. The oil and gas industry accounts for 56 of the companies, and 37 are involved in coal production.
Although Amazon is not on the Carbon Majors list, the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform receives upward of 1,000,000 daily users from companies that include GE Oil & Gas and Shell. The Amazon employees planning to strike want the company to end the contracts with these major emissions contributors.
For the Amazon workers, tomorrow’s strike isn’t their first attempt to influence their company.
Last year, a group of employees filed a shareholder proposal pushing for directors to be more transparent about the company’s climate-change efforts. More than 8,200 employees signed their names to an open letter to Jeff Bezos in support of the resolution. The proposal failed, but did receive 30% of the votes.
Although Amazon introduced The Climate Pledge, the employees still plan to strike.
“But the great thing is, the effort that we’ve put in has gotten our coworkers who normally would have never known anything about Sept. 20 to start talking about it,” Roshni Naidu, a senior technical product manager at Amazon’s Seattle campus and spokesperson for AECJ, told Karma.
For employees like Naidu, this strike is about raising awareness. As more of her coworkers know what’s happening with the climate crisis and what their company can do to stop it, Naidu believes their growing numbers can continue pushing for change.
