The employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, organized workers around climate action and storage conditions during the pandemic before they were fired in April 2020.
The federal agency said it would file a complaint if the case was not resolved, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news on Monday. NLRB confirmed the finding to CNN Business.
Cunningham told CNN Business on Monday that “she couldn’t be happier with today’s news.”
“It’s a moral victory and it feels incredible to be not only on the right side of history, but also on the right side of the law,” she said. “Amazon tried to silence the workers and it didn’t work. In fact, we are stronger than ever. The organization continues to grow at Amazon.”
In the meantime, Amazon (AMZN) appeared to defend the termination of its employees. Amazon spokesman Jaci Anderson told The Times that he “fired these employees not to speak publicly about working conditions, safety or sustainability, but rather for repeated violations of domestic policies.”
“We support the right of every employee to criticize the employer’s working conditions, but this does not come with general immunity against our internal policies, all of which are legal,” Anderson said.
Amazon and Costa did not immediately respond to CNN Business’s requests for comment.
The news comes at a time when the company has been openly antagonistic to criticism of its working conditions, especially the working conditions of its employees in the warehouse. Union elections at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama have once again shed some harsh light on working realities for Amazon and drawn national attention from prominent figures, including President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders and voting activist Stacey Abrams . The vote – which began last Tuesday – will determine whether workers will form the first Amazon union in the United States in its nearly 27-year history.
Cunningham and Costa, both experienced user designers, are founding members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of corporate employees who were initially trained to advocate for climate issues. The group continues
talk about problems faced by his employer, including supporting workers who want to join a union.
Cunningham and Costa’s statement is the latest crackdown on Amazon workers in which the federal agency has found merit. In November, the NLRB filed a lawsuit against Amazon for the illegal termination of a Pennsylvania warehouse worker. According to an analysis of NLRB data by NBC News, there have been at least 37 allegations of retaliation filed against the agency against Amazon in 20 cities since February 2020. While the pandemic has been a boon to Amazon’s business, virus-related security measures as well as general conditions at work, were also a factor behind a more general uprising of employees at its facilities. NBC News reported that NLRB is considering whether to strengthen the allegations, given the number of similar complaints.
At the time, the dismissal of Cunningham and Costa led to the resignation of Amazon engineer and vice president Tim Bray. In a long blog post about his departure, Bray said that “he gave up Amazon in dismay, throwing out whistleblowers about the warehouse employees who were frightened by Covid-19.”
“Dismissal of whistleblowers is not just a side effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It is evidence of a vein of toxicity that runs through the company’s culture,” Bray wrote. “I don’t choose to serve and not drink that poison.”
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