Amazon denies stories of worker exploitation, receives a flood of evidence in return

Amazon is using a new tactic, denial, in its battle against stories of its exhausting and exploitative working conditions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working.

In a reply to a tweet from Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) complaining about the company’s union-busting tactics and the fact that some of its workers are forced to “urinate in water bottles,” Amazon’s official Twitter account responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

People do believe these stories, however, and for the simple reason that there are numerous accounts of it happening, documented by employees and journalists around the world.

After Amazon sent out its ill-judged tweet, reporters who cover the company’s labor practices practically lined up to soak the firm with evidence. These included English journalist James Bloodworth, whose 2018 book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain documented his experience of low-paid work for companies including Amazon.

Bloodworth’s book led to some of the most widely shared stories about Amazon workers being forced to pee in bottles to save time while meeting the company’s targets, but he’s not the only one to document this exact example of poor working conditions.

Jacobin writer Alex Press shares a much grimmer anecdote of an Amazon worker who suffered a seizure in one of the company’s facilities.

This story though is only the tip of the iceberg.

Evidence includes the high injury rates in Amazon warehouses (7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees), employees dying from COVID-19 after complaints the company wasn’t doing enough to mitigate risks from the virus, widespread union-busting, production targets that treat humans like robots, and gruesome anecdotes like the story of the Amazon worker who died from a heart attack and who, say colleagues, was left on the work floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment.

Although Amazon refuses such claims, it’s hard to take a company seriously when they seem so ready to write their own “truth”.