#Jeff Bezos urges Amazon workers to cancel all meetings on Juneteenth

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stopped short of making Juneteenth a company holiday, as other business giants have, instead urging workers to cancel all of their Friday meetings.

In a memo to employees with the subject line “Juneteenth,” Bezos said that he has spent time “thinking about how recent events in our country have laid bare the systemic racism and injustices that oppress Black individuals and communities.”

The world’s richest man wrote that he would be canceling his end-of-week meetings on the Juneteenth holiday — which marks the date on June 19, 1865, when the abolition of slavery was announced in the state of Texas — and suggested that employees follow his lead.

He added that Amazon would be staging “learning opportunities” throughout the day for workers to educate themselves.

“Please take some time to reflect, learn, and support each other,” Bezos wrote, according to CNBC. “Slavery ended a long time ago, but racism didn’t.”

Employees will still be expected to show up for work, however, unlike workers at Twitter and Nike, which both made Juneteenth company holidays in the wake of massive global protests against the May 25 Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd as well as police brutality and systemic racism.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced that New York would be recognizing Juneteenth as an official state holiday, calling it “a day that we should all reflect upon.”