E-commerce giant Amazon has apologized to a US lawmaker after falsely denying that some of its drivers are forced at times to urinate in plastic bottles.
The flap started last week with a tweet from US Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat.
“Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” Pocan wrote on Twitter, in an apparent reference to Amazon’s opposition to efforts to unionize a major facility in Alabama.
Photo: AFP
Amazon’s official account quickly responded, saying: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
However, several news media then cited numerous Amazon employees who said they had been left with little choice but to use plastic bottles.
The Web site The Intercept said it had obtained internal documents showing that Amazon executives were aware of the practice.
The workers’ testimony underlined the complaints of many Amazon employees — both in its processing facilities and among its drivers — about what they say is a relentless work pace.
“We owe an apology to Representative Pocan,” Amazon said in a statement late on Friday.
“The tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers,” each of which, it said, has dozens of restrooms that employees can use “at any time.”
“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” Amazon said.
It described the problem as “a long-standing, industry-wide issue,” adding that “we would like to solve it.”
Pocan on Saturday responded on Twitter, saying: “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers - who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity.”
“Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone & finally, let them unionize without interference,” he said.
Workers at Amazon’s huge processing facility in Bessemer, Alabama, completed a vote Monday last week on whether to unionize — an initiative strongly resisted by the company. The result has not been announced.
BEIJING BAILOUT: Pyongyang’s economic woes would not lead to famine because China will not let that happen due to its fear of a pro-US unified Korea, experts say North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has called for another “arduous march” to fight severe economic difficulties, for the first time comparing them to a 1990s famine that killed hundreds of thousands. Kim had previously said his nation faces its “worst-ever” situation due to several factors — including the COVID-19 pandemic, US-led sanctions and natural disasters in the summer last year — but it is the first time he has publicly drawn a parallel with the deadly famine. North Korea monitoring groups have not detected any signs of mass starvation or a humanitarian disaster, but Kim’s comments still suggest how seriously he views
The COVID-19 variant discovered in South Africa can “break through” Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study released on Saturday found, although its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed. The study in Israel compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated people with the disease. It matched age and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1 percent of all the COVID-19
RARE ADMISSION: A top Chinese expert was the first to publicly address the efficacy of the nation’s vaccines as it aims to inoculate 40 percent of its population by June China is considering mixing different COVID-19 vaccines to improve the relatively low efficacy of its existing options, a top health expert told a conference in Chengdu on Saturday. Authorities have to “consider ways to solve the issue that efficacy rates of existing vaccines are not high,” Chinese media outlet The Paper reported, citing Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Gao Fu (高福). His comments mark the first time a top Chinese expert has publicly alluded to the relatively low efficacy of the country’s vaccines, as China forges ahead in its mass vaccination campaign and exports its jabs around the world. China
A years-long David and Goliath fight which has seen two Australian surfers take on a Chinese-linked company over alleged damage of an idyllic Fijian island has come to its conclusion after a court handed down a guilty verdict against the developers yesterday. The case has been described by Pacific legal experts as a “watershed” moment that tested Fijian environmental laws, as well as the willingness of the nation — which presents itself as a global climate leader — to “walk the walk” on environmental issues. Freesoul, a Chinese-linked company, in 2018 began work on Malolo Island, with plans to build Fiji’s largest
RSS