Amazon has long disagreed with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for their criticism of the company’s labor and business practices. But the discord reached a new high last week when Amazon aggressively attacked the two on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large company. With every sneaky new tweet from an Amazon executive or the company’s official Twitter account, insiders and observers have asked a version of the same question: “What the hell is going on?”
It turns out that Amazon executives were following a broad mandate from the highest level of the business: to fight.
Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has expressed his displeasure in recent weeks because company officials weren’t more aggressive in the way they stood up to criticism of the company than he was. and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of sneaky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.
The timing was probably not a coincidence. Bezos and other Amazon executives are on the verge of breath as the company faces the biggest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Election results will be counted early this week, and Amazon officials understand that if a majority of employees vote to unionize, it could set off a chain reaction at other facilities, with the potential to force the giant ecommerce to overhaul the way it manages its hundreds of thousands of frontline American workers. There was terror in Amazon’s management ranks the last time a union election was held at an Amazon U.S. facility – and it was only a small subset of a warehouse’s workforce, the majority of whom voted against unionization. This vote took place in early 2014 and involved just 27 technicians and mechanics at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware. In Alabama, however, the stakes are much higher with nearly 6,000 workers eligible to vote. Bezos knows all of this well.
So when news broke last week that Sanders was planning to travel to Alabama in the final days of voting, Amazon top executive Dave Clark launched a Twitter thread beginning with the following message.
“I welcome @SenSanders to Birmingham and appreciate their drive to create a progressive workplace,” Clark’s report posted on Wednesday. “I often say that we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite fair because we actually provide a progressive workplace.”
1/3 I welcome @SenSanders to Birmingham and appreciate their drive to create a progressive workplace. I often say that we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not entirely true as we actually offer a progressive workplace https://t.co/Fq8D6vyuh9
– Dave Clark (@davehclark) 24 mars 2021
Hours later, the official media relations Twitter account “Amazon News”, with more than 170,000 subscribers, hit back at House Representative Mark Pocan, who had questioned Clark’s claim on the “Progressive workplace” by alluding to stories about Amazon’s pace of work. so demanding that workers have to “urinate in water bottles”.
“You don’t really believe in the bottle pee thing, do you?” the official Amazon News account tweeted. “If it was true, no one would work for us.”
1/2 You don’t really believe in the pee in bottles thing, do you? If it was true, no one would work for us. The truth is, we have over a million amazing employees around the world who take pride in what they do and enjoy great pay and healthcare from day one.
– Amazon News (@amazonnews) 25 mars 2021
And after a back and forth with Senator Elizabeth Warren who began by criticizing the company’s tax payments, the same Amazon account “tweeted” Warren with this message:
It is extraordinary and revealing. One of America’s most powerful politicians has just said that she is going to dismantle an American company so that she can no longer criticize it. https://t.co/Nt0wcZo17g
– Amazon News (@amazonnews) 26 mars 2021
An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
If Bezos wanted the news cycle a little bit unrelated to the labor movement, it sort of worked. But instead of talking about the union, media and industry watchers have focused on the scarcity and judgment of a trillion-dollar company arguing with powerful lawmakers on Twitter. Amazon’s denial of the congressman’s comment on workers who pee in bottles also sparked a new round of news after The Intercept revealed internal Amazon communications acknowledging that contractors who deliver Amazon packages sometimes defecate in bags and urinate in bottles.
Amazon warehouse workers who have spoken to Recode over the years say it is indeed rare to hear of a warehouse worker – as opposed to a delivery man – urinating into bottles at work. But the biggest point many make is that it’s not uncommon for workers to take other measures, such as limiting the amount of alcohol they drink, to reduce their need to use the bathroom. fear bathing of missing their production quotas or of being criticized by supervisors for too much. “Free time task,” as Amazon calls it.
Inside Amazon, core employees were also puzzled by the company’s Twitter approach. “Suspicious activity on @amazonnews Twitter account,” was the title of an internal support ticket – called a corporate incident ticket. – filed by an Amazon security engineer last week, according to a screenshot seen by Recode.
“In the past two days there have been two threads by @amazonnews in response to comments from US government officials who have received considerable attention,” the post read. “The tweets in question do not correspond to the usual content posted by this account. “
The security engineer noted that the tweets were posted using Twitter’s web app rather than Sprinklr, the social media management software typically used by the Amazon News account to post tweets.
The tweets, according to the security engineer, “are unnecessarily antagonistic (endangering Amazon’s brand) and may result from unauthorized access.”
The support ticket was closed without action, according to a source.
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