By Matt McKnight

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Some Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:) workers staged a walkout on Wednesday in protest of the e-commerce large’s modifications to its local weather coverage, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.

Greater than 100 folks gathered within the afternoon by the Spheres, the glass-dome monument on the coronary heart of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, in line with a Reuters witness. “Emissions climbing. Time to behave!” the group chanted. “Stand collectively; do not flip again!”

Greater than 1,900 workers had pledged to protest globally, in line with the organizers, an activist group referred to as Amazon Staff for Local weather Justice (AECJ).

Amazon stated it had not noticed actions apart from in Seattle.

The walkout follows strikes that took Amazon “within the fallacious path,” AECJ has stated. Amongst them, the corporate not too long ago eradicated a objective to make all Amazon shipments web zero for carbon emissions by 2030, although it nonetheless has a broader pledge on local weather for a decade later.

Amazon additionally introduced some 27,000 function cuts in latest months, or 9% of its company workforce, a shift for an organization that lengthy touted its job creation. A return-to-office mandate by Could 1 brought on confusion for some employees as to whether or not they wanted to relocate houses nearer to work or whether or not they can be laid off beforehand.

In an announcement, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser stated the corporate is pushing laborious to chop its carbon emissions.

“For corporations like ours who eat a variety of energy, and have very substantial transportation, packaging, and bodily constructing property, it’ll take time to perform,” he stated. “We stay on monitor to get to 100% renewable vitality by 2025.”

He added that Amazon listens to worker suggestions and was proud of the collaboration that arose from its return-to-office coverage.

There have been different protests in recent times, together with in 2019, when Amazon employees had been amongst tons of of workers of huge expertise corporations to hitch marches in San Francisco and Seattle, saying their employers had been too gradual to deal with world warming.