Amazon on Friday issued a rare apology to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) due to the way in which it responded to a tweet about its drivers urinating in water bottles.
Amidst union voting in Alabama, Pocan last month blasted Amazon for its treatment of employees, many of whom resort to peeing in bottles during long delivery stints behind the wheel. Despite well-documented evidence backing up the issue, the official Amazon News Twitter account responded in kind. "You don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?" it said. "If that were true, nobody would work for us."
In retrospect, the public message may not have been Amazon's best line of defense. "That was an own-goal, we're unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan," a Friday blog post said. The company, however, offered no mea culpa to the people actually working under these conditions.
"The tweet was incorrect," Amazon admitted. "It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers"—where employees are "able to step away from their work station at any time" to use one of the "dozens" of available restrooms. Which, of course, is not usually the case for delivery drivers.
"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," the Amazon continued, pointing to a number of other firms with the same problems. "Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don't yet know how, but will look for solutions."
Amazon is on edge recently over the Alabama union election, which closed late last month. The National Labor Relations Board has not yet announced the results, but a successful vote could encourage similar efforts across Amazon's million-plus workers.