Scores of employees at Wayfair Inc. walked off the job on Wednesday to protest the online retailer’s sale of beds to contractors furnishing border camps for asylum seekers.
Workers left the company’s Boston headquarters around 1:30 p.m. and walked to nearby Copley Square, where the event drew at least hundreds of supporters. Groups of protesters led chants and played music before company employees and other speakers took to a portable microphone and individual interviews to make their cases.
“We sent out a petition to Wayfair leadership,” a protester who identified himself as Wayfair engineer Tom Brown told Bloomberg News, “and we got a response that we were not satisfied with. We don’t want to profit off these detention centers, these concentration camps, whatever you’d like to call them, and we want to do something about it.”
The organized walkout came after more than 500 employees signed a letter to company management urging it to stop doing business with detention camp contractors and demanding that the profits from the order in question be donated to a nonprofit agency offering legal services to immigrants.
Brown said he was “extremely” nervous at the event, given he’s only worked at Wayfair for about four months.
As backlash emerged online, Wayfair said that it would donate profits from the sale of about $200,000 worth of bedroom furniture to the American Red Cross, coming out to a gift of about $100,000.
BCFS, a nonprofit government contractor who the letter says bought the Wayfair goods for the camps, stood by its involvement in a Tuesday evening email.
“We believe youth should sleep in beds with mattresses,” BCFS Public Information Officer Krista Piferrer said in an emailed statement.
When asked about BCFS’s statement, Madeline Howard, who says she’s worked for Wayfair for six and a half years, said that’s not the employees’ position.
“It’s our job to make it as hard as possible for them to operate these camps, and what we’re doing is an attempt to basically throw a wrench into what they’re attempting to do,” she said. “We don’t think the camps should run at all, we don’t think they should exist at all, and this is our way of telling them that.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman Democrat from Queens who has become a leading progressive voice in Congress, tweeted her support ahead of the protest.
