Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has waded into a dispute over Amazon’s handling of its workers, claiming that a relation of hers left the company amid unimaginable performance pressure and that defecating in bags was a common approach to manage work activity.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke out as almost 6,000 Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama were deciding whether they want to form a union, the biggest labour push in the online shopping giant’s history.
The organising in Bessemer could set off a chain reaction across its operation nationwide, with more workers rising up and demanding more favourable working conditions. Vote counting started on Tuesday and could take several days.
AOC joined Democrats including Bernie Sanders and Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan who are demanding multimillion tech giant allows workers to form unions to be able to push for better conditions.
The New York congresswoman tweeted that on Tuesday night a loved one of hers that worked at Amazon delivery last year left because of how vulnerable it made them feel, working for a company that also puts so much preference pressure on their workers that defecating in bags is a regular enough occurrence that there are internal memoranda about it and that her complaint was frequently made.
And the practice of peeing in bottles to maintain workflow in Amazon warehouses was fairly well documented.
Even delivery drivers claim to be under such pressure that relieving oneself couples with threats of joblessness, and last week, Rep Pocan made a comparable claim to Ocasio-Cortez and he said that paying workers $15 an hour doesn’t make them a progressive workplace, when they union bust and make their workers pee in water bottles.
And Amazon replied, on their official Twitter account: ‘You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” And that if that was true, nobody would work for them, and they said that the truth was that they have over a million incredible employees around the world who were proud of what they did and that they have great wages and health care.
According to Brookings, Amazon and Walmart combined raked in approximately $10.7 billion in profits throughout the pandemic, signalling a 56 per cent rise in business, something the institute attributed to Americans spending more on home delivery rather than venturing out to the shops to circumvent exposure during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic.
Not sure about defecating in bags, but the bottle thing does sound like it could be real, and it wouldn’t be difficult for a delivery driver to hide out in the back of his delivery van to pee, and then dump the bottles in the garbage containers around the parking area before driving off.
