A group of Ama­zon work­ers up­set about re­cent lay­offs, a re­turn-to-of­fice man­date and the com­pa­ny’s en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact is plan­ning a walk­out at the com­pa­ny’s Seat­tle head­quar­ters Wednes­day.

The lunchtime protest comes a week af­ter Ama­zon’s an­nu­al share­hold­er meet­ing and a month af­ter a pol­i­cy took ef­fect re­quir­ing work­ers to re­turn to the of­fice three days per week.

“We re­spect our em­ploy­ees’ rights to ex­press their opin­ions,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment.

As of Tues­day night, more than 1,800 em­ploy­ees had pledged to walk out around the world, with about 870 in Seat­tle, ac­cord­ing to Ama­zon Em­ploy­ees for Cli­mate Jus­tice, a cli­mate change ad­vo­ca­cy group found­ed by Ama­zon work­ers.

While some plan to gath­er at the Ama­zon Spheres — a four-sto­ry struc­ture in down­town Seat­tle that from the out­side looks like three con­nect­ed glass orbs — oth­ers will par­tic­i­pate re­mote­ly.

Brad Glass­er, an Ama­zon spokesper­son, said there has been a good en­er­gy on the com­pa­ny’s South Lake Union cam­pus and at its oth­er ur­ban cen­ters since more em­ploy­ees re­turned to the of­fice. More than 20,000 work­ers, how­ev­er, signed a pe­ti­tion urg­ing Ama­zon to re­con­sid­er the re­turn-to-of­fice man­date.

“As it per­tains to the spe­cif­ic top­ics this group of em­ploy­ees is rais­ing,” Glass­er said in a state­ment, “we’ve ex­plained our think­ing in dif­fer­ent fo­rums over the past few months and will con­tin­ue to do so.”

In a Feb­ru­ary memo, Ama­zon CEO Andy Jassy said the com­pa­ny made its de­ci­sion to re­turn cor­po­rate em­ploy­ees to the of­fice at least three days a week af­ter ob­serv­ing what worked dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Among oth­er things, he said se­nior lead­er­ship watched how staff per­formed and talked to lead­ers at oth­er com­pa­nies. He said they con­clud­ed em­ploy­ees tend­ed to be more en­gaged in per­son and col­lab­o­rate more eas­i­ly.

In a note ask­ing Ama­zon em­ploy­ees to pledge their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the walk­out, or­ga­niz­ers said Ama­zon “must re­turn au­ton­o­my to its teams, who know their em­ploy­ees and cus­tomers best, to make the best de­ci­sion on re­mote, in-per­son, or hy­brid work, and to its em­ploy­ees to choose a team which en­ables them to work the way they work best.”

Some em­ploy­ees have al­so com­plained that Ama­zon has been slow to ad­dress its im­pact on cli­mate change. Ama­zon, which re­lies on fos­sil fu­els to pow­er the planes, trucks and vans that ship pack­ages all over the world, has an enor­mous car­bon foot­print. Ama­zon work­ers have been vo­cal in crit­i­ciz­ing some of the com­pa­ny’s prac­tices.

In an an­nu­al state­ment to in­vestors, Ama­zon said it aims to de­ploy 100,000 elec­tric de­liv­ery ve­hi­cles by 2030 and reach net-ze­ro car­bon by 2040. But walk­out or­ga­niz­ers con­tend the com­pa­ny must do more and com­mit to ze­ro emis­sions by 2030.

The walk­out fol­lows wide­spread cost-cut­ting at Ama­zon, where lay­offs have af­fect­ed work­ers in ad­ver­tis­ing, hu­man re­sources, gam­ing, stores, de­vices and Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, the com­pa­ny’s cloud com­put­ing di­vi­sion. The com­pa­ny has cut 27,000 jobs since No­vem­ber.

Like oth­er tech com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Face­book par­ent Meta and Google par­ent Al­pha­bet, Ama­zon ramped up hir­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to meet the de­mand from home­bound Amer­i­cans who were in­creas­ing­ly shop­ping on­line to keep them­selves safe from the virus.

Ama­zon’s work­force, in ware­hous­es and of­fices, dou­bled to more than 1.6 mil­lion peo­ple in about two years. But de­mand slowed as the worst of the pan­dem­ic eased. The com­pa­ny be­gan paus­ing or can­cel­ing its ware­house ex­pan­sion plans last year.

Amid grow­ing anx­i­ety over the po­ten­tial for a re­ces­sion, Ama­zon in the past few months shut down a sub­sidiary that’s been sell­ing fab­rics for near­ly 30 years, shut­tered Ama­zon Care, its hy­brid vir­tu­al, in-home care ser­vice, and closed Ama­zon Smile, a phil­an­thropic pro­gram.

SEAT­TLE (AP) —