More and more stories of Amazon and its maltreatment of workers in its warehouse. Workers have been complaining about the bad working conditions and very few breaks for a while. The most common complaint was that workers were forced to pee in bottles due to the fact that breaks didn’t last long enough for them to properly use bathrooms. Twitter is plagued with complaints from workers but somehow mysteriously it’s also being filled with tweets from ‘workers’ who say that everything is fine.
Amazon initially denied all accusations, especially those saying that workers were forced to urinate in bottles sometimes because the breaks weren’t long enough. Despite Amazon denying these claims, evidence came up to back those claims.
It started when, Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin said in a tweet about Amazon making “workers urinate in water bottles” in a tweet. The Amazon News Twitter handle replied in a condescending tone saying that wasn’t true and if it was then no one would want to work for them.
You can view the tweet below.
Amazon has since apologized in a statement saying that “..we owe an apology to Representative Pocan. First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers. A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of restrooms, and employees are able to step away from their work station at any time. If any employee in a fulfillment center has a different experience, we encourage them to speak to their manager and we’ll work to fix it.”
Though that’s nice and all, I wonder how much of that is actually true. They also went on to blame the Covid situation for this saying that “we know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed.”
Pocan has since rejected their apology saying in a tweet that “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers – who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity. Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone, and finally, let them unionize without interference.”