Sarah Tew / CNET
The “thing to pee in bottles” is, in fact, true, Amazon said Friday, when issuing a public apology for a tweet from its Amazon News account that suggested stories about its drivers urinating on bottles while they worked are false.
“You really don’t believe in this thing of peeing in bottles, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us,” said the company at that time. original, March 24 tweet, which was a response to a tweet from Congressman Mark Pocan. Pocan Tweet he said, “Paying workers $ 15 / hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you break the union and make workers pee in water bottles.”
Amazon retracted its original tweet on Friday, saying in a blog post that the tweet was “incorrect” and that it owed Pocan an apology.
“We know that drivers can and have difficulty finding toilets because of traffic or sometimes rural routes,” said the company in the post, “and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public toilets were closed. “
The apology may indicate that the company is having doubts about a series of exceptionally aggressive tweets that skyrocketed last month. Amazon made headlines in March with sarcastic tweets addressed to Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. After Sanders, from Vermont, said he would travel to Alabama in the last days of a union vote at an Amazon warehouse there, the company’s head of consumer operations responded to Twitter.
Read More: Amazon on the edge: what’s behind their sarcastic tweets from Sanders and Warren
“I welcome @SenSanders in Birmingham and thank you for your effort for a progressive workplace,” said Dave Clark, Amazon executive tweeted on March 24th. “I often say that we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that is not right because we are actually offering a progressive workplace.”
The angry tweets have appeared while lawmakers in the United States and elsewhere are investigating Amazon and other major technology companies what critics have accused are anti-competitive practices. Companies face potential regulation that may force them to close down or weaken their power. Amazon also faces prospect of unionized workforce amid accusations that mistreat it is workers, and critics say the company doesn’t pay enough taxes.
Related: Amazon union vote: what may mean election at a warehouse in Alabama
In its apology on Friday, Amazon said the problem with the bathroom break also affects drivers at other delivery services and transportation companies. “Regardless of the fact that this is for the entire industry, we would like to resolve it. We still don’t know how, but we will look for solutions ”, said Amazon in its post.
The company also said that the original tweet “erroneously focused only on our distribution centers”. In 2018, an author disguised himself at an Amazon call center in Britain and claimed that workers there urinated in bottles for fear that regular trips to the bathroom will cost them their jobs. Amazon contested that claim. In its Friday post, the company said that distribution center employees can take breaks to go to the bathroom whenever necessary.
“A typical Amazon distribution center has dozens of bathrooms and employees can move away from their workstation at any time,” said the company in the post. “If any employee at a distribution center has a different experience, we encourage you to speak to your manager and we will work to fix it.”