The special area of “Etc” is used for some administrative zones, particularly for “Etc/UTC” which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with “Etc/GMT” have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the “Etc” area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g “Etc/GMT-14” is 14 hours ahead of GMT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Area