An Amazon executive said he quit his job at the online-retail giant to protest the firing of employees who spoke up about the conditions inside the company’s warehouses and its record on climate change.

Tim Bray, a vice president at the company, wrote in a blog post that he left his job last week “in dismay” after Amazon fired several workers who publicly criticized the company. He said the firings were “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.”

He wrote:

“May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.”

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, declined to comment.

The company operates several facilities across North Carolina, including a huge warehouse in Garner.

Among those fired was a New York warehouse worker who led a strike last month, pushing Amazon for more protections for workers against the new coronavirus. At the time, Amazon said the worker was fired for not obeying social-distancing rules.

“Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them,” he added.

“It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don’t like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don’t need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.”

Don’t say it can’t be done, because France is doing it.

Bray, who said he worked at Amazon’s cloud business for more that five years, said he brought up the firings internally at the company.

“That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” he wrote. “So I resigned.”

Read the full blogpost online.