Amazon admitted that its drivers have to pee in bottles due to traffic or trouble finding toilets on delivery rides, publicly apologizing to a U.S. Congressman who denounced the situation, and to which the company responded with a tweet now calling it considered “incorrect”.
“This was our own goal, we are not happy and we owe an apology to Representative (Mark) Pocan,” Amazon said in a statement on its blog.
“We know,” said the internet sales giant, “that drivers can have trouble finding toilets through traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this is especially the case during the COVID, when many toilets were closed. Public”.
However, according to the note, it is “a long-standing problem that affects the entire industry and is not specific to Amazon,” a fact that the company illustrated with a series of articles on the topic.
The company, which is already the country’s second-largest employer, retracted the message it posted to Twitter on March 24 in response to Pocan, a Democratic representative from Wisconsin.
“Paying workers $ 15 an hour doesn’t make it a ‘progressive workplace’ when a union is destroyed and workers have to pee in water bottles,” Pocan said in a tweet.
“You really don’t believe in peeing in bottles, do you?” Amazon replied again.
“If that were true,” he added, “no one would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees worldwide who take pride in what they do and have excellent salaries and healthcare from day one. . “
In its apology on its blog, Amazon pointed out that its tweet was “wrong.”
“It didn’t target our large population of drivers and instead erroneously focused only on our fulfillment centers. A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of toilets and employees can walk away from their workplace at any time,” the note explains.
In any case, Amazon indicated that it wanted to fix the problem, although it still admitted that it still doesn’t know how, but has promised to look for solutions.
“We will continue to speak up when false information is presented, but we will also work hard to always be accurate,” concluded the statement from the Seattle-based company, which has fought to prevent what would become the first US syndicate. can be. where the workforce groups about 800,000 employees.