This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. You can read it here.
Amazon vice president Tim Bray won praise from labor rights advocates on Monday after resigning from the company over its treatment of whistleblowers during the Covid-19 pandemic, publishing a "scathing" letter on his personal blog explaining the decision.
After more than five years as a vice president at the company, Bray wrote that he was quitting "in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19."
In the letter, Bray defended Amazon workers including Staten Island warehouse employee Chris Smalls and Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) organizers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, all of whom were fired after leading petitions and protests over unsafe conditions in the retailer's warehouses as the pandemic continues to spread across the United States.
"Firing whistleblowers isn't just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets," wrote Bray, who was a "distinguished engineer" and is now the highest-ranking Amazon employee to speak out about the company's conduct during the pandemic. "It is evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison."
Smalls, Costa, and Cunningham were among those who thanked Bray for speaking out.
Other advocates noted the significance of Bray's stand against the powerful company.
"This is a really big deal," wrote author Naomi Klein. "This kind of courage is what we need right now, in every workplace and walk of life."
Bray said he brought his concerns to company executives in April after Cunningham and Costa were fired after starting a petition on behalf of the warehouse workers. He formally resigned and published the open letter after his complaints went unheeded.
Amazon's actions in recent weeks—including its attempted smear campaign against Smalls, who organized a walkout over a lack of social distancing protocols and transparency at the Staten Island facility—were "designed to create a climate of fear," wrote Bray, who also slammed his former employer as "chickenshit."
Bray acknowledged in his post that Amazon says it is taking precautions to protect workers in its warehouses, but wrote, "The big problem isn't the specifics of Covid-19 response. It's that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that's not just Amazon, it's how 21st-century capitalism is done."
The former company executive pointed out that the e-commerce giant, while a formidable power in the U.S., has been reined in elsewhere. In France, where Amazon workers are represented by unions, a court last month ruled that the company must only complete deliveries of essential products while its warehouses' safety measures are being investigated.
"If we don't like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things," Bray wrote. "We don't need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward. Don't say it can't be done, because France is doing it."
Bray's letter comes three days after employees at Amazon were joined by workers at Trader Joe's, FedEx, Whole Foods, and Instacart in a May Day strike over wages, public health precautions, and working conditions.
Increasing low-wage workers' influence over decision-making at huge companies will require sustained pressure campaigns with widespread support, particularly from those in positions of power, suggested Bray.
"At the end of the day, it's all about power balances," Bray wrote. "The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the U.S.) job-linked health insurance. So they're gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength."
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
Gif of Robin Williams via 
A woman conducts a online color testCanva
A selection of color swatchesCanva
A young boy takes a color examCanva 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.