(Adds company's comments in paragraph 3, 4 and 5)
Three Amazon.com (AMZN) employees claim the company opened HR investigations after they testified in support of a Seattle moratorium on new data center construction, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
The workers, members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, were separately summoned into HR meetings the week after their public testimony, with at least one told the investigation could lead to discipline or termination, according to a letter their lawyers sent to the Seattle Office for Civil Rights requesting an investigation, the report said.
"While our teammates are always free to talk about their working environment, we have policies against speaking as a representative of the company without following certain procedures - all of which are clearly agreed to by everyone who works at Amazon, and are similar to policies at many other companies," said amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan.
"As we looked more closely at how these employees represented themselves, and how their comments were received by others, it became clear that they may have been speaking in their capacity as Amazonians and not as private citizens.
"We believe it's important to apply our policies consistently so, just as we would with anyone else, we're investigating whether there was a violation of our policies and may or make not take action based on what we find. It's important to note that we don't tolerate retaliatory behavior. It's also inaccurate to say that we have plans to terminate these employees or told them they were at risk of termination," she added.
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