A senior Amazon software engineer has resigned after five years at the company, citing in a weekend blog post his “dismay” over management’s decision to fire critics of its labor practices during the coronavirus crisis.

“I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about employees frightened of Covid-19,” Tim Bray wrote in the blog post, adding that “remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.”

Bray was upset at Amazon’s dismissal of several warehouse employees who criticized the conditions at its facilities during the pandemic and then at the firing of two user experience designers who were upset with the company over its treatment of the warehouse workers, according to CNBC.

Amazon warehouse workers nationwide have urged the company to enact greater safety protections, have staged protests at facilities in Staten Island, Detroit and Illinois, and took part in recent nationwide strikes.

Bray said that his attempts to raise concerns about the firings within the company were unsuccessful.

Bray, who is the highest-level Amazon employee to go public on the issue, stressed in his blog that the "victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls."

Smalls was the first high-profile firing during the crisis, according to The Hill, when he was dismissed after organizing a walk out at a Staten Island facility where an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Amazon has defended the dismissals, saying the workers broke internal company policies.

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