Amazon apologized Friday for a March 25 tweet in which the company rebutted Democratic Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan’s allegation that its “workers urinate in water bottles.”
The company acknowledged that “drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes,” in a blog post that condemned their earlier tweet.
The apology comes after what company referred to as “an own-goal” response to Pocan’s tweet, where the congressman slammed Amazon’s retail business CEO Dave Clark’s statement about “delivering a progressive workplace.” (RELATED: ‘What Is Your Problem?’: Sanders Slams Bezos Over Amazon Unionization Fight)
“Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” Pocan said at the time.
“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us,” Amazon News replied at the time to Pocan’s accusations on Twitter.
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
“First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers,” the statement reads. “The tweet did not receive proper scrutiny. We need to hold ourselves to an extremely high accuracy bar at all times, and that is especially so when we are criticizing the comments of others.”
“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 statement said.
Although the issue is an “industry-wide” one, Amazon vowed to address it. “We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions,” they said in the statement.