Tag: Petition

Thousands of Amazon’s tech workers have signed a petition calling for the e-commerce giant to provide paid time off to all of its employees to vote.

© Provided by CNN

Between Amazon’s corporate and warehouse employees, as well as Amazon-owned Whole Foods’ workers, the company employs more than 1.3 million people in the United States and is the second largest private employer in the country.

The petition, first reported by NBC News, calls for eight hours of paid time off to be made available to employees to use up until Election Day for voting-related activities, including registering to vote and volunteering.

More than 3,000 employees have signed the petition, which launched Tuesday morning via an internal company tool and was organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of corporate employees that originally formed to advocate on climate issues, applying pressure to the company and seeing some results.

Earlier this year, two of the organization’s leaders — Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa — were fired after being vocal about warehouse worker conditions during the pandemic. Amazon said in a statement at the time that it “terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”

In order to give people the opportunity to vote, hundreds of companies, including Walmart, Starbucks, and Twitter, have announced they would give workers some additional paid time off.

But Amazon “currently requires workers to use vacation time to vote (if they have it) or gives the bare minimum time off as required by individual state laws,” according to a press release from the organizing group.

Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson said in a statement to CNN Business: “We have supplied all of our employees with information on how to register to vote, details of their local polling locations and how to request time off to

The Ex-PM’s petition calling for a royal commission into the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is proving rather too much for the Australian Parliamentary website. So many users have reported problems trying to sign it that even the site itself admits it’s in trouble.

The Rudd Petition is having a hard time

Kevin Rudd’s petition calls for a Royal Commission into the influence of News Corporation on the Australian media landscape. While the merits of that approach are certainly debatable as a control measure, what’s not debateable is that it’s proved conceptually very popular indeed. At the time of writing some 88,747 people had signed, according to the APH web site.

That number might be much higher, however, with numerous reports over the weekend that users trying to sign the petition couldn’t. The sheer weight of numbers trying to do so brought the APH website to its knees.

Call me paranoid but is anyone else having trouble logging in to Kevin Rudd’s petition calling for a media royal commission?

— ????Brian Jones (@Darthspoog) October 10, 2020

So many people wanting to sign Kevin Rudd’s #MurdochRoyalCommission petition

that Morrison’s government have deemed it a cyber attack.

We’re coming for you. pic.twitter.com/SNkuRI0O8W

— Jules Knew A Spook ???? ???? ????????‍♂‍ ???? ???? (@and_spook) October 10, 2020

As of Monday, it still appears to be an issue:

Rudd’s petition calling for a #MurdochRoyalCommission has been so popular it brought down the parliament site hosting the petition and people were suspected of being bots for the sheer volume of people wanting to sign. So be patient and go sign the petition #auspol https://t.co/FOMKXVoVZ5

— Martin Andersen (@mtsandersen) October 12, 2020

It’s proved to be so much of an issue that there’s now a disclaimer on the APH website, stating that:

“We are aware