The Problem With Amazon

 

Amazon went viral the other day. Only in the worst possible way. Over the last few years, journalists have been detailing the "shameful" working conditions of Amazon warehouse employees and delivery drivers. One main thing that has continued to stand out is the report that workers end up having to urinate in bottles due to the company hardly allowing any bathroom breaks. On March 24th via Twitter, Representative Mark Pocan brought up Amazon's union-busting and the aforementioned peeing in bottles. Not long after, an official Amazon Twitter account replied with the now-infamous: " 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." https://twitter.com/amazonnews/status/1374911222361956359?s=20

This reply was deemed to be some classic "damage control" and quickly went viral, getting thousands of interactions in just several days. Many journalists who had documentation of the workers peeing in bottles, rightfully accused Amazon of lying in an attempt to control their image. This caused other reported workplace problems to gain traction, like Amazon doing very little to protect warehouse employees from COVID-19.

On April 2nd, in part due to the extreme backlash, Amazon apologized for disputing Mark Pocan's claim and apologized for lying. They released the statement to their website rather than apologizing via Twitter. What's even crazier is that the pee bottle-denying tweet is still up (seriously! go check right now).

This one event is just a microcosm of how corporations function. They are able to become million-billion dollar corporations due to the exploitation of workers. The exploiting can be things like underpaying, union-busting, and little to no worker protections. That is how places like Amazon make their money. The government needs to further regulate corporations to ensure that workers are being taken care of. Amazon has too much money for employees to not be able to go to the bathroom and feeling unprotected due to unsafe workplace conditions. I hope we end up seeing some real change soon.