(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc apologized to US Representative Mark Pocan, acknowledging that he scored an “own goal” in the initial denial of his suggestion that his drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during rounds of delivery.
“We know that drivers can and have trouble finding toilets due to traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this happened especially during Covid, when many public toilets were closed,” the company said in a post on blog bit.ly/2PnoLKr.
His admission came a week after the Democrat criticized Amazon’s working conditions, saying in a tweet: “Paying workers $ 15 / hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive job’ when you unionize your bust and make them workers urinating in water bottles. ”
Amazon initially denied it, saying in a tweet: “You don’t really believe in the urine thing in bottles, do you? If it were true, no one would work for us. “But later those comments went back.
“This was our own goal, we are dissatisfied with it and we owe an apology to the Pocan Representative,” Amazon said in its blog post, adding that its previous response referred only to staff in warehouses or fulfillment centers.
The company said the problem is industry-wide and will look for solutions without specifying what they could be.
Amazon’s apology comes at a time when warehouse workers in Alabama are waiting for a number of votes that could lead to the first online union of the online retailer in the United States and mark an important moment for organized work.
Amazon has long discouraged attempts to organize its more than 800,000 American employees. The claims of many workers about a grueling or insecure job have turned the company’s unionization into a key goal for the US labor movement.
Reporting of Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Montage by David Holmes