A scene from a video shown by Amazon during its virtual annual shareholders meeting.

Working at Amazon is either like “winning a golden ticket,” or dealing with a “vein of toxicity” that runs through the company.

Those were the dueling visions of Amazon presented during the company’s annual meeting Wednesday morning by senior executives and organizations seeking to hold the company accountable for its response to the COVID-19 crisis and a wide variety of social and global issues.

Shareholders made the case for 11 proposals seeking to reform Amazon’s policies on everything from the environment to workplace discrimination. Each of the proposals was voted down. But the meeting, held virtually for the first time, provided a high-profile platform for criticism of the company.

“Toxicity is embedded in our operations as pollution causes stunted lung development, asthma, and higher death rates from COVID-19 concentrated in black and brown communities,” former employee Maren Costa said in presenting one shareholder resolution. “This is environmental racism.”

However, the company got the first and the last word, starting the meeting with a series of vignettes from front-line workers and highlighting its investment in COVID-19 initiatives, expected to cost some $4 billion this quarter alone. In some cases, the videos implicitly countered critics who have been pressuring Amazon to be more transparent about the toll of the disease on its workers, and to take further action to ensure their safety.

“If anything, they took it overboard on the safety, and that’s what I love,” one employee said in the video.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ended the meeting with a pledge: “You can count on us to use our inventiveness, to use our scale and scope and to use our resources to improve our customers’ lives, to improve our employees’ lives and to improve the communities where we do business. I promise you will never stop doing those things.”

Bezos and other Amazon executives were not visible on video during the meeting, which instead showed their pictures in slides during their remarks.

Costa, one of two high-profile former Amazon employees who were fired for speaking out about the company’s response to climate change and COVID-19 presented one proposal. In a pre-recorded statement, she called out the company on behalf of the activist group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

Addressing Bezos directly, Costa cited a handful of controversial firings over the past few weeks, including the dismissal of Christian Smalls, a warehouse worker in New York who was fired after organizing a walkout calling for broader safety measures. Amazon says Smalls was fired for violating a company-enforced quarantine but a leaked memo, in which Amazon executive David Zapolsky sought to use Smalls as a PR tactic, cast doubt on the claim.

“Jeff, I worked for you for 15 years,” Costa said. “But I and eight others were recently fired, and VP Tim Bray resigned, citing a vein of toxicity that runs through the company. This toxicity showed up in senior leadership meetings, with racist comments, and a plan to smear Chris Smalls. Toxicity is embedded in our operations, as pollution causes stunted lung development, asthma, and higher death rates from COVID-19 concentrated in black and brown communities. This is environmental racism.”

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice participated in the event to promote a shareholder resolution asking Amazon to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2030, focusing first on communities of color and other marginalized groups facing the most severe impacts of climate change.

Inside the meeting last year, the activist group stood in solidarity to press the company to take more aggressive action to reduce its impact on the environment. Amazon several months later announced its “Climate Pledge,” with Bezos saying the company was “done being in the middle of the herd on this issue.” The Climate Pledge commits Amazon to reach carbon neutrality by 2040.

This year’s shareholder resolutions covered topics including food waste; law enforcement’s use of Amazon’s technologies for surveillance; and policies and controls on products that promote hatred, violence or bias. Another proposal revives an effort to replace Bezos as board chair and require the director in that position to be independent.

One pre-recorded presentation included the voice of an employee who said a skip-level manager blocked her request for a proposal asking, “why do you think you’re ready for a promo? You should spend some time getting a boyfriend or having fun.”

“These stories are a common experience and they are happening at every level at Amazon and across the tech industry,” said Hana Thier, an Amazon software engineer, during the meeting. “Sexism and racism hurt those who experience it, our recruitment and retention, and public image and profit margins. I urge you to support the important proposal so you can assess the true risk to Amazon and its employees.”

Zapolsky said Amazon takes “all accusations of discrimination seriously and they have no place at Amazon or any other workplace” in response to the presentation.

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