By firing them, they are reinforcing the idea they they don't care about working conditions. A reprimand likely wouldn't have made the news.

I assume they want less buzz about work conditions.

The Streisand effect is when someone actively takes actions to hide information, but it backfires. I haven't seen any evidence of them taking actions to hide any information.

>I assume they want less buzz about work conditions.

I don't think this is the case. They have been public about responding to the media and have been posting daily updates through their own site. The link to their blog discussing workers' conditions is on the front page of Amazon.com.

Firing outspoken employees counts as an attempt to suppress information to me. The firing itself becoming news is the backfire. They essentially gave the warehouse conditions an extra news cycle.

We may be missing information here, but I am not sure these employees even had any first-hand information to suppress. I went to their twitter pages and couldn't find any myself.

It doesn't matter whether they had any actual info. It's the perception. Firing them feeds it further.

The power imbalance makes it easy for Amazon to act like this. Even if they get sued and lose, they have billions. It's like when Google got fined by the EU, and it was just a day's profit. Amazon is a shredder; so large that it just wipes out swaths of businesses, leaving broken employees in its wake.