At Slate, Daniel Politi reports that Amazon has admitted its drivers have to pee in bottles and issued an apology to the U.S. representative it mocked on Twitter for making the claim.
Amazon rowed back an initial denial that it gave last week when it aggressively responded to Rep. Mark Pocan on Twitter. The Democrat from Wisconsin was replying to a tweet from a top Amazon executive and said that the company can't call itself a progressive workplace when it "union-busts and makes workers urinate in bottles." Amazon scoffed at the claim. "You don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?" the company said on Twitter. "If that were true, nobody would work for us."
This remarkably ill-conceived denial was met by immediate and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Like tone-deaf attacks on other politicians around the same time, it was ultimately said to be the fault of Amazon's own leadership angrily taking the reins of the PR horse. The context: unionization efforts among Amazon's workforce in Alabama.
