{"id":2372,"date":"2026-06-19T02:39:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T02:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2372"},"modified":"2026-06-19T02:39:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T02:39:14","slug":"amazon-seattle-data-center-moratorium-aecj-disciplinary-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2372","title":{"rendered":"Amazon employees say they\u2019re facing termination for backing data center limits"},"content":{"rendered":"


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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\u2019re accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On June 10th \u2014 one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium<\/a> on data centers \u2014 Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon\u2019s \u201cEmployee Relations.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI am unwilling to accept a reality in which Amazon or any corporation can silence me in exercising my rights,\u201d Schloesser told The Verge<\/em> in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to step back in line.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said, \u201cWhile our teammates are always free to talk about their working environment, we have policies against speaking as a representative of the company without following certain procedures \u2026 we\u2019re investigating whether there was a violation of our policies and may or may not take action based on what we find. It\u2019s important to note that we don\u2019t tolerate retaliatory behavior. \u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Amazon also disputed the characterization that Amazon had plans in place to fire the employees. Callahan said, \u201cIt\u2019s also inaccurate to say that we have plans to terminate these employees or told them they were at risk of termination.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The news comes shortly after Seattle officially enacted<\/a> 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 including Schloesser, Irani, and Wigand \u2014 were among them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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<\/a> signed by more than 1,000 Amazon employees that urged Amazon to power all its data centers with 100 percent additional, local renewable energy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019d been working on for months. He answered the call to find an HR representative, who asked Schloesser about his whereabouts and what he\u2019d said at the City Council meeting \u2014 and immediately got a \u201cforeboding sense that this is not a safe place for me.\u201d Schloesser said it felt like the representative \u201cwas trying to get me to admit to something,\u201d particularly due to the lack of notice. He recalled the representative saying he violated Amazon\u2019s 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 \u2014 not, say, as a \u201csoftware engineer at Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Schloesser said he felt \u201ckind of horrified\u201d after the meeting. He added, \u201cWe all harnessed this sense of indignation and anger that after everything we\u2019ve gone through at this company, and after making a very uncontroversial statement where we\u2019re simply exercising our rights to speak out politically as employees in the city of Seattle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Irani told The Verge<\/em> that he received an email from HR on June 9th, with a calendar event for the next day to discuss a \u201cconfidential\u201d matter. He said the representative asked about other Amazon employees who had attended the City Council hearings and that he felt like \u201cthey were waiting for me to admit I had done something wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI 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\u2019d faced similar experiences, then I started feeling angry \u2014 because all I was doing was sharing my opinion that AI and data centers should be regulated,\u201d Irani said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The legal complaint filed Thursday alleges that Amazon violated Seattle law and requests that the Office for Civil Rights \u201cinvestigate these allegations and take all necessary action to remedy any unlawful discrimination committed by Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Abby Lawlor, AECJ\u2019s counsel and an attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, said in a statement that Seattle is \u201cone 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\u2014investigating them and threatening their employment as a direct consequence of their advocacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAmazon\u2019s attempts to intimidate our members is an unfair and discriminatory employment practice,\u201d said AECJ spokesperson Eliza Pan in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019t just steamroll all of us to get what they want. Amazon can\u2019t be allowed to intimidate its employees and we should all be worried if they succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Irani said that he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt really makes me upset how communities have been excluded and are facing so many consequences and harms from how this buildout has been done,\u201d he said. \u201cCommunities should have a say in how [data center] infrastructure is rolled out. So I was proud to testify.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s average use on a given day \u2014 and would use 10 times more power than the city\u2019s current number of data centers, according to The Seattle Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nationwide outrage over the construction of giant data centers has increasingly<\/a> made<\/a> headlines<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Schloesser said the retaliation for speaking out didn\u2019t come as a total surprise. \u201cPretty much as soon as I started I was aware of this culture of fear that Amazon creates \u2014 they do it with layoffs, they do it with performance improvement plans, stack ranking us to compete against each other, unregretted attrition quotas,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re afraid of losing your job just by doing the work that you\u2019re expected to do day to day, you\u2019re very unlikely to be willing to step out of line and do anything like speak out. Even if it\u2019s legally protected speech.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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