Amazon apologizes for lying about pee — and attempts to shift the blame

Pocan 2, workers 0

By Jefe digitals Apr 3, 2021, 4:33am EDT

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has issued a rare public apology — but not to its workers, and with no real admission of guilt.

Over a week ago, the company was caught publicly lying to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) that its workers never feel the need to pee in water bottles (which is, in fact, a well-documented issue at Amazon because of how it robotically tracks and fires its laborers).

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Now, late on the Friday evening before Easter weekend, when few (hat tip to GeekWire) are paying attention, the company is apologizing to Pocan — and no one else. Amazon only apologizes for not being “accurate” enough, too — not for actually creating and contributing to situations where workers pee in bottles.

The @AmazonNews account didn’t bother to tweet any of this, BTW

In fact, Amazon goes so far as to suggest the whole pee bottle thing is simply a regrettable status quo, pointing out a handful of times when other companies’ delivery drivers were also caught peeing in bottles, as well as embedding a handful of random comments on Twitter that happen to support Amazon’s views. You can almost hear Jeff Bezos saying “Why aren’t these people blaming UPS and FedEx? Let’s get more people thinking about them instead.”

The blog post also strongly suggests that this is only an issue for delivery drivers, not Amazon’s warehouse workers — even though a 2018 expose from an undercover reporter found Amazon warehouse workers were also forced to skip bathroom breaks, and a worker who spoke to journalists just last week suggested bathroom breaks were still an issue in 2021. “You’re sitting there and you have to go take a piss, but you don’t want to rack up ‘time off task,’” she told Motherboard.

Amazon is currently facing a lawsuit over missed lunch breaks as well. And most importantly, all of this is happening in the shadow of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama that could help shape the future of labor in the United States, let alone at Amazon.