(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc. has apologized to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, admitting he scored a “goal of his own” in his first denial of his suggestion that his drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during their delivery rounds.
“We know that drivers can and have trouble finding toilets due to traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid, when many public toilets have been closed,” the company said in a blog post bit.ly/2PnoLKr.
His admission came a week after the Democrat criticized Amazon’s working conditions and said in a tweet, “Paying workers $ 15 an hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive job’ when you do a union and make workers urinate in water bottles “.
Initially, Amazon issued a denial and said in a tweet, “You don’t really believe in urinating in bottles, do you? If that were true, no one would work for us. ”But he later backtracked on those comments.
“That was a goal of our own, we are unhappy with that and apologize to Rep. Pocan,” Amazon said in its blog post, adding that its previous response only referred to staff at its warehouses or compliance centers.
The company said the problem was industry-wide and would look for solutions, without specifying what they might be.
Amazon’s apologies come at a time when workers at an Alabama warehouse are expecting a vote count that could lead to the online retailer’s first unionized facility in the United States and mark a turning point for to organized work.
Amazon has long discouraged attempts to organize itself among its more than 800,000 American employees. The accusations of many workers of a grueling or insecure job have made company syndication a key target for the American labor movement.
Report by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Edited by David Holmes