WASHINGTON – E-commerce giant Amazon has apologized to a U.S. lawmaker after falsely denying that some of its drivers are sometimes forced to urinate in plastic bottles.
The unrest started last week with a tweet from Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin.
“Paying workers $ 15 / hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you break the union and make workers urinate in water bottles,” tweeted Pocan, in an apparent reference to Amazon’s opposition to efforts to unionize an important facility in Alabama.
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The official Amazon account responded quickly, saying, “You really don’t believe in this thing about peeing in bottles, do you? If that were true, no one would work for us. ”
But several media outlets cited several Amazon employees who said that, in fact, there was no other choice but to use plastic bottles.
And The Intercept said it had obtained internal documents showing that Amazon executives were aware of the practice.
The workers’ testimony underlined the complaints of many Amazon employees – both at their processing facilities and among their drivers – about what they say is an unrelenting pace of work.
“We owe apologies to Representative Pocan,” Amazon said in a statement on Friday.
“The tweet was incorrect. It did not address our large population of drivers and instead erroneously focused only on our service centers, ”each of which, he said, had dozens of bathrooms that employees could use“ at any time ”.
Amazon continued: “We know that drivers can and have difficulty finding toilets because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid, when many public toilets were closed.”
He described the problem as “a longstanding problem across the industry”, adding, “we would like to solve it”.
The apology did not satisfy Pocan, who responded on Saturday on Twitter, saying:
“Sigh. It’s not about me, it’s about your employees – whom you don’t treat with sufficient respect or dignity.
“Start by recognizing the inadequate working conditions you have created for ALL of your workers, then fix it for everyone and finally let them unionize without interference.”
Workers at Amazon’s massive processing facility in Bessemer, Alabama, completed a vote on Monday about unionization – an initiative strongly resisted by the company. The result has not yet been released.
Amazon has successfully rejected unionization efforts in other parts of the United States, although most of its facilities in Europe are unionized.
The company insists that its workers enjoy good wages and benefits by US standards.
