Amazon issues rare apology for falsely denying that their workers 'pee in bottles'

After falsely denying charges of making workers ‘pee in bottles’, Amazon has issued a rare apology to US Representative Mark Pocan.

The company further said that they will look for solutions to resolve such situations.

Mark Pocan in his tweet had said amazon makes its worker “urinate in bottles.”

"Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles," Pocan said.

Paying workers $15/hr doesn't make you a "progressive workplace" when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles. https://t.co/CnFTtTKA9q

— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) March 25, 2021

Amazon had denied exploitative working conditions at its facilities and said that the company’s union-busting tactics allegations are baseless.

"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,” Amazon replied in its tweet.

1/2 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.

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021

"We hope you can enact policies that get other employers to offer what we already do," the company further stated.

2/2 We hope you can enact policies that get other employers to offer what we already do.

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021

The company has now issued an apology to Pocan and said that this is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon.

"Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions. We will continue to speak out when misrepresented, but we will also work hard to always be accurate," the company said in a statement.

"First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centres," Amazon said.

"Second, our process was flawed. The tweet did not receive proper scrutiny. We need to hold ourselves to an extremely high accuracy bar at all times, and that is especially so when we are criticising the comments of others," the company added.

"This was an own-goal, we’re unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan".

The Twitter war started over Amazon’s tweet last week and several journalists and people who have documented such incidents at Amazon facilities began flooding the Web.

(With agency inputs)