Amazon senior vice president of worldwide operations Dave Clark tells Lesley Stahl, “We have a zero tolerance policy for retaliating against people.” But a memo, leaked to Vice News, suggests the company was going to go after an employee who tried to organize protests around workers’ safety, calling him “not smart or articulate.” Clark says those comments were “unfortunate” and a result of “frustration.” The interview, including a look inside Amazon to see some new safety protocols and future innovation, will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, May 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Clark’s interview comes as nine U.S. senators have called on Amazon to provide more information into the recent terminations of several protest leaders. The senators are looking into the issue of whistle-blower retaliation. Clark says the firing of protest leader Chris Smalls, and any other workers terminated after speaking out against the company, was for policy violations and not retaliation. “If you go through each one of those individuals what you’re going to find is some sort of substantive policy violation or safety violation that occurred in the process,” says Clark.
Smalls, a former assistant manager at an Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York, says he was fired for organizing a walkout. “All we wanted was the building to be closed down and sanitized,” he tells Stahl. The state of New York is also looking into the firings. Last week, a top engineer at Amazon quit the company publicly over its treatment of warehouse workers demanding rights, saying their handling is “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”
Clark’s boss, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, committed in late April to spending more than $4 billion to respond to the coronavirus, including on issues of worker safety. Says Clark, “If anybody walked into this with a perfect playbook for how to execute, continuing to send essential goods to people in the middle of a pandemic, I’d love to see it. You know, do I wish we were perfect from day one? Of course. Do I feel like we put people in unnecessary risk? No.”
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