An anonymous reader shares a report: To paraphrase one of the most iconic tweets of the past 10 years, Amazon’s recent denial about employees not being forced to urinate in bottles at work has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the denial. In a tweet sent last night, the official Amazon News account for the behemoth corporation, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, saw his personal net worth increase by $70bn during the pandemic, wrote: “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.” In under 12 hours the tweet has been quote-tweeted 9,000 times. (For those unversed in the dark Twitter metric arts that’s … not good.)
The thousands of gleeful and mocking rejoinders to Amazon’s post came with good reason. The company is currently in the midst of a public relations battle with a group of workers in Alabama attempting to unionize. In an attempt to forestall such a historic move, Amazon has been on a campaign to illustrate just how well, in fact, they treat their workers. It doesn’t seem to be working! Numerous high-profile labor organizers, celebrities and politicians like Bernie Sanders have joined the side of the striking workers. The Vermont senator is set to travel to Alabama on Friday to meet with them. The botched PR response in question in this case came as a reply to a tweet from another lawmaker, the Wisconsin congressman Mark Pocan, who himself was responding to jabs thrown by another Amazon executive, Dave Clark. Clark had attempted to draw a snarky analogy between his company and the success record of Sanders in his home state, saying: “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.” Further reading: Amazon Denies Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles.
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Source: Slashdot – Amazon’s Denial of Workers Peeing in Bottles Sparks Questions and Backlash