Bob Smith, who is the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ rocket company named Blue Origin, replied to the reports saying that their work environment is “toxic” and “sexist”, assuring employees that they have “zero tolerance for harassment and discrimination.” But Bob Smith did not accept that they were doing anything wrong or didn’t even apoptosis in the email they sent to employees on Thursday.
“It is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterize our entire team in a way that doesn’t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day,” Smith wrote.
The email sent by Bob Smith came a lot later after 21 present and ex employees published a letter accusing them. The mentioned that several company heads and leaders have been behaving inappropriately with women since a long time and consistently. These leaders also included a Senior Executive who fell under Smith’s inner circle.
“Even so, Smith personally made him a member of the hiring committee for filling a senior HR role in 2019,” the letter says, without naming the senior executive.
There were many leaders who also showed that there was a “clear biased against women in the company,” as per the letter, which was further signed by Alexander Abrams, who was once the Head of employee communications at Blue Origins until 2019. Rest of the 20 signatories were done anonymously.
In the email written by Smith, the CEO did not respond to any specific allegations but told employees that “we will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.”
Letter which came on Thursday also accused senior leadership at Blue Origin of fostering a culture of “suppression of dissent” which has definitely put safety at risk.
Even one engineer anonymously signed the letter made a statement saying “Blue Origin has been lucky that nothing has happened so far.” The letter adds that “teams are stretched beyond reasonable limits.”
“Blue Origin seemed to give beating Elon Musk and Richard Branson in the billionaire space race priority over safety concerns”, the group added.
Later on Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration said that they would review the safety allegations that were raised in the employee letter.
