Paging Sean Spicer.
The former White House press secretary made a quick name for himself at the outset of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017 when he was dispatched by his boss to debate inauguration crowd sizes.
He would have had fun in Seattle on Wednesday.
In Spicer’s alternate reality, the walkout by corporate and tech employees at Amazon may have looked like several thousand participants. In GeekWire’s view, the rally next to The Spheres at the tech giant’s headquarters brought out 300 to 500 at best.
It wasn’t an easy crowd to count. It was lunchtime, after all, and despite the free pizza on hand, plenty of people seemed to be milling on the outskirts, stopping for a quick listen as speakers aired grievances over the company’s return-to-work policy and its lack of progress on climate change initiatives.
Others in the crowd were camouflaged by the trees and greenery that line the walkways around The Spheres, or were up behind the speakers’ podium near the dog park. Some may have worked elsewhere and stumbled upon the event. Many were media. And some were security and police. One Seattle officer told us there were “probably 200” attendees.
The Puget Sound Business Journal cited “up to a few hundred” at the demonstration’s peak. The Seattle Times credited Amazon with estimating that 300 walked out. Bloomberg also reported a few hundred.
But organizers of the event went a little Spicer on us. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice called it a “large-scale walkout” with over 1,000 participants at the Seattle HQ. They credited an expert with experience estimating the size of such gatherings.
In terms of concrete numbers, organizers said they logged 998 walkout pledges in Seattle and 2,143 worldwide. They also noted anecdotally that some people walked out without pledging. For the record, Amazon has more than 65,000 corporate and tech employees in the Seattle area, part of a workforce of 350,000 corporate and tech employees worldwide.
Triple that 350,000 number to get close to the crowd size at President Obama’s 2013 inauguration. Sorry, Spicer, just comparing some numbers!
Regardless of whether there were 10 people or 10,000, the Amazon walkout was a rare example of corporate and tech employees speaking out publicly against the company.
“We are here because we want to build a better Amazon,” one speaker said.
