The Washington Post reports that “on Friday, more than 1,700 Amazon employees presented CEO Andy Jassy with a petition calling for the company to ‘rescind all contracts with the Israeli military and call for an immediate, durable, and sustained cease-fire.’ While that’s a small fraction of Amazon’s total workforce of more than 1 million, employees say the pro-Palestine momentum in corporate America is a significant shift in the face of the U.S. tech industry’s strong business ties to Israel. It reflects a broader trend among Americans, who have increasingly called for President Biden to put an end to the violence in Gaza.”
The story says that the Israel-Hamas war has created internal strife at Amazon: “An Amazon employee in London shared photos of office elevators with ‘Free Palestine’ written on them. Another employee said they received messages saying Israel would only stop bombing Gaza when the hostages were returned, according to screenshots seen by the Post. And a third employee wrote in a post to the Jewish affinity Slack channel seen by the Post that most of Gaza’s residents ‘support terror’ and that ‘no peace is possible with such animals.’
“‘There’s such tension between Arabs and Jewish employees right now,’ one employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job told the Post. ‘That’s very palpable’.”
“We don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind in the workplace,” Amazon spokesman Rob Munoz tells the Post. “We investigate all reported incidents of such behavior and take appropriate action against any employee who is found to have violated our policies, up to and including termination.”
KC’s View:
This is a challenge to every workplace, and CEOs have to be both fast and compassionate in how they deal with these issues.
It won’t be enough for some, but the basic position needs to be that while there will be political differences within any organization, the bottom line needs to be that we will all respect each other in our business: “Our most important rule is that all discourse will be civil.”
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