Amazon Admits Delivery Drivers Do Sometimes Pee in Bottles

From : Amazon on Friday issued a rare apology to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) due to the way in which it responded to a tweet about its drivers urinating in water bottles.

Amidst union voting in Alabama, Pocan last month blasted Amazon for its treatment of employees, many of whom resort to peeing in bottles during long delivery stints behind the wheel. Despite well-documented evidence backing up the issue, the official Amazon News Twitter account responded in kind. "You don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?" it said. "If that were true, nobody would work for us."

In retrospect, the public message may not have been Amazon's best line of defense. "That was an own-goal, we're unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan," a Friday blog post said. The company, however, offered no mea culpa to the people actually working under these conditions.

"The tweet was incorrect," Amazon admitted. "It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers"—where employees are "able to step away from their work station at any time" to use one of the "dozens" of available restrooms. Which, of course, is not usually the case for delivery drivers.

View: Full Article