Tim Bray, Amazon.com’s Defector

Bray was the highest-profile person to speak up during a wave of activism at the tech giant. In March, Amazon fired two warehouse workers in what they said was retaliation for speaking up about safety conditions. Two more warehouse workers were fired in April, along with two activists at headquarters who’d already been campaigning to get Amazon to address its impact on climate change and were now highlighting the workers’ plight. (Amazon said that it changed more than 150 procedures in its facilities to accommodate social distancing and that dismissed workers violated policy or endangered colleagues.)

On May 1, Bray quit, and the explanatory blog post he published made international headlines. His decision was unprecedented: People close to Amazon’s brain trust typically haven’t been publicly receptive to addressing worker unrest, and the company ramped up a public-relations campaign to stress that its warehouses are safe. In the post, Bray, who’s now advising startups and podcasting, talked about curtailing Amazon’s influence: A “combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.”