#Peegate redux
Late Friday, Amazon published a post in the “Policy news & views” section of its AboutAmazon.com website titled “Our recent response to Representative Pocan” and bylined “By Amazon Staff.” It begins,
On Wednesday last week, the @amazonnews Twitter account tweeted the following back to Representative Mark Pocan:
1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one. —Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021
This was an own-goal, we’re unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan.
Pocan, a Wisconsin congressman, had tweeted, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles”—which was itself a response to a tweet from Dave Clark, Amazon’s CEO Worldwide Consumer, claiming that Amazon is a progressive workplace.
Anyway, Amazon’s Friday follow-up rambled on a bit about how its “tweet was incorrect” and “did not receive proper scrutiny”—and 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. This is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon.”
What Amazon didn’t acknowledge is the white-hot rage that its attempted clapback at Rep. Pocan had caused. On March 25, because of that snarky @amazonnews tweet, “Amazon News” became a trending topic on Twitter, with thousands of tweets piling on the retailer for, among other things, “gaslighting” its workers and the Twittersphere.
One big problem with Amazon’s apology post is that it attempts to suggest that the “peeing in bottles thing” is only a problem with its delivery workers. “A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of restrooms,” the post asserts, “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.”
But a lengthy, front-page Reddit discussion over the weekend drew plenty of comments begging to differ, including this one from an Amazon fulfillment center worker:
As someone who was personally reprimanded for being off task for 6 minutes for the purpose of walking to one of the 2 male restrooms at a fulfillment center, using it to number 2, and return... When I advised that the alternative was shitting my pants, I was advised that, without a medical accommodation, I was expected to limit restroom use to one of my two 15 minute breaks or my 30 minute lunch (per 10 hour shift). So yeah, able to? Technically correct. Able to without reprimand? Outlook points to ‘bullshit’.
Stay tuned.
Essential context: “Amazon has issued a rare public apology—but not to its workers, and with no real admission of guilt,” as The Verge’s Sean Hollister puts it.
See also: “Amazon started a Twitter war because Jeff Bezos was pissed,” per Recode/Vox.
Flashback: An April 23, 2018 tweet by Nigel Flanagan, a UK-based union organizer, that uses the hashtag #peegate in reference to a strike among Amazon workers in Berlin—and includes a graphic that shows a water bottle next to the headline, “Hey Alexa, why are Amazon workers using this as a bathroom?"
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