When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they’re accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them.
On June 10th — one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium on data centers — Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s “Employee Relations.” HR representatives told the employees that the company was investigating them and said there could be disciplinary action, up to and including termination. On Thursday, the three filed a legal complaint requesting that the Seattle Office for Civil Rights investigate the matter, alleging that Amazon engaged in prohibited employment discrimination.
“I am unwilling to accept a reality in which Amazon or any corporation can silence me in exercising my rights,” Schloesser told The Verge in an interview. “We’re not going to step back in line.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news comes shortly after Seattle officially enacted a one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers, tabling new proposals while council members consider legislation to award the city more 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 data center regulations and the moratorium. 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 1,000 Amazon employees that urged Amazon to power all its data centers with 100 percent additional, local renewable energy.
Schloesser says that when he received a cold call over Zoom, he was less than half an hour away from a design review meeting, where he was set to show dozens of people a project he’d been working on for months. He answered the call to find an HR representative, who asked Schloesser about his whereabouts and what he’d said at the City Council meeting — and immediately got a “foreboding sense that this is not a safe place for me.” Schloesser said it felt like the representative “was trying to get me to admit to something,” particularly due to the lack of notice. He recalled the representative saying he violated Amazon’s corporate communications policy, which bans acting as a spokesperson for Amazon without preapproval. But Schloesser, like the other Amazon employees who testified at the City Council hearings, only identified himself by his role and his membership in AECJ — not, say, as a “software engineer at Amazon.”
Schloesser said he felt “kind of horrified” after the meeting. He added, “We all harnessed this sense of indignation and anger that after everything we’ve gone through at this company, and after making a very uncontroversial statement where we’re simply exercising our rights to speak out politically as employees in the city of Seattle.”
Irani told The Verge that he received an email from HR on June 9th, with a calendar event for the next day to discuss a “confidential” matter. He said the representative asked about other Amazon employees who had attended the City Council hearings and that he felt like “they were waiting for me to admit I had done something wrong.”
“I left this meeting feeling rattled and unsure of myself, but after speaking with the other two AECJ members who gave testimony, to find that they’d faced similar experiences, then I started feeling angry — because all I was doing was sharing my opinion that AI and data centers should be regulated,” Irani said.
The legal complaint filed Thursday alleges that Amazon violated Seattle law and requests that the Office for Civil Rights “investigate these allegations and take all necessary action to remedy any unlawful discrimination committed by Amazon.”
Abby Lawlor, AECJ’s counsel and an attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, said in a statement that Seattle is “one of just a few jurisdictions in the country that prohibits private employers from discriminating against their employees based on the political beliefs they hold and the organizations they belong to. This protection gave AECJ members confidence in speaking out before the Seattle City Council in favor of local data center and AI regulation, and it prohibits exactly what Amazon is doing now—investigating them and threatening their employment as a direct consequence of their advocacy.”
“Amazon’s attempts to intimidate our members is an unfair and discriminatory employment practice,” said AECJ spokesperson Eliza Pan in a statement. “It’s an abuse of our democracy and rule of law. Tech workers must be able to speak and act on their beliefs so that CEOs can’t just steamroll all of us to get what they want. Amazon can’t be allowed to intimidate its employees and we should all be worried if they succeed.”
Irani said that he’s closely followed the data center buildouts around the country and that he believes, as many people testified at the City Council hearings, that the benefits are going mostly to tech companies and not locals.
“It really makes me upset how communities have been excluded and are facing so many consequences and harms from how this buildout has been done,” he said. “Communities should have a say in how [data center] infrastructure is rolled out. So I was proud to testify.”
Two months before the Seattle City Council voted on the moratorium, four unknown companies had submitted proposals for five large-scale data centers within the city limits, which would, combined, have a maximum electricity demand that equaled one-third of Seattle’s average use on a given day — and would use 10 times more power than the city’s current number of data centers, according to The Seattle Times.
Nationwide outrage over the construction of giant data centers has increasingly made headlines in recent months, with complaints including noise levels, water usage, rising local electricity costs, and more. The issue has especially roiled the broader Seattle metropolitan area, where Amazon and Microsoft are both headquartered.
Schloesser said the retaliation for speaking out didn’t come as a total surprise. “Pretty much as soon as I started I was aware of this culture of fear that Amazon creates — they do it with layoffs, they do it with performance improvement plans, stack ranking us to compete against each other, unregretted attrition quotas,” he said. “If you’re afraid of losing your job just by doing the work that you’re expected to do day to day, you’re very unlikely to be willing to step out of line and do anything like speak out. Even if it’s legally protected speech.”