We didn't think Amazon was nice and cuddly - but this is a good point for Tim to exit.
Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical. I think we can criticize Amazon's long history of being repressive without shaming someone who publicly did the right thing.
Very specifically, yes. A bit more generally, it's not different from a pattern of conditions like "heat so extreme it required the regular posting of ambulances to take away workers who passed out, strenuous workloads in that heat, and first-person reports of summary terminations for health conditions such as breast cancer".
> Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical.
I don't agree that doing one good thing undoes bad things that went before, and that it absolves one from criticism.
This seems a straw man argument. I don't think the author was saying that before Covid-19 Amazon listened to their workers.
On the contrary, one sentence before what you quoted ("Fast-forward to the Covid-19 era"), the article describes how activists were threatened with dismissal.
Sorry, but none of this is new in "the Covid-19 era". There is a long Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of Amazon detailing decades of criticism of how Amazon treats its workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
Better of Tim to exit late than never, but let's not pretend that until recent firings and this blog post we all thought that Amazon was a nice and cuddly company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray says he started there in December 2014. He must have known at that point what he was getting into. For reference, here's the state of the criticism page at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_Amaz...