Originally published at: Amazon admits workers have to pee in bottles | Boing Boing
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To be clear, the article is about admitting that Drivers (on the road, far from public bathrooms) do sometimes resort to peeing in bottles.
This should not be surprising to anyone who’s ever had a job where they needed to drive a lot. Finding a public bathroom is pretty much impossible in many locations.
Who here has never resorted to peeing on the side of road during a long drive? Especially when you’re on some smaller state road where there is no hope of seeing a rest stop?
Peeing in bottles is something long-haul, and delivery drivers have done since forever.
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The linked Vanity Fair article is interesting. TL;DR is that Bezos is so terrified of unions that he’s gotten super aggro with the PR people and started tweeting himself. That’s where gems like this are coming from:
I hate it when rich people and corporations make disingenuous arguments like that. You damn well know the difference between following the spirit of the law (ie. basic business ethics) and exploiting the letter of it to your advantage with armies of accountants and tax lawyers. Just because it’s technically legal to locate your headquarters in the Maldives or shuffle all your income through shell companies* so you don’t have to pay any taxes doesn’t mean any honest ethical person who cares about the country would do those things. When companies do this stuff, it forces politicians to create ever more Byzantine rules to try and close the loopholes, which makes life hell for small businesses like mine who can’t afford an army of accountants just to figure out what we’re supposed to do.
Bernie said it right- there shouldn’t even be billionaires. Something is wrong with the system if there are.
*made up examples of things these corporations do- not necessarily exactly what Amazon does
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I have a guess how Amazon will handle this:
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it was ultimately said to be the fault of Amazon’s own leadership angrily taking the reins of the PR horse.
That explains a lot. Literal amateur-hour PR attempts from butthurt bosses always end up backfiring.
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True. Those bottles you often see on the side of the highway and in the rest stop parking lots are not holding lemon Gatorade.
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So bezos may have a few less billions. I’m not going to lose any sleep.
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Brings a whole new meaning to “Bad Pee Rrrr”.
You’re welcome!
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For most of us, this happens only under very unusual circumstances. The “Amazon policy” that management expresses internally (and then publicly denied) is “your bodily needs matter less than your meeting our expected times”, with the expectation that workers should relieve themselves on their own time, even if it means urinating AND DEFECATING in bottles/bags when you’re “on their time”.
Two relevant quotes from TFA:
Amazon employees said their performance is monitored so closely by the firm’s vast employee surveillance arsenal that they are constantly in fear of falling short of their productivity quotas.
and
a delivery driver for an Amazon delivery contractor … told The Intercept that the practice “happens because we are literally implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many ‘undelivered packages.’”
Finally, Amazon’s attitude is not just encouraging drivers to pee/poo in bottles/bags. It’s also Amazon warehouse workers, many of whom also say that they have to urinate in bottles or risk being fired and tagged as “insufficiently efficient” workers.
This attitude is inhumane and dehumanizing, and is endemic to most large corporations’ views about their lowest paid workers… Amazon simply takes this attitude one step further than do most other large companies.
FWIW, I have never read a story about Costco treating their workers like this (and I hope that I never do).
(edited for grammar corrections)
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Dear drivers - long haul or otherwise, if you are rolling through my hood, feel free to get out of the vehicle and use my bathroom.
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…and then Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle pops in my head. I think I’m broken. 
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They’re only admitting to the drivers doing it when we know the warehouse workers have to do it as well.
Additionally nearly all amazon drivers are not long haul drivers but work within urbanized areas delivering to residences and businesses.
That their expected delivery rate is too high to accomodate bathroom breaks is despicable.
You may want to reconsider apologizing on behalf of a trillion dollar corporation. They can defend themselves if they’re innocent.
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You know it won’t even be a brand name catheter either. It’ll be from a company with 4.9 stars and a name like URILOUY or PEEZAL, who all have the same pictures of the same products.
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The mailman that delivers to our office as well as UPS/Fedex/etc tend to use our bathrooms since we’re one of the few places with readily accessible public facilities. The mailman specifically said it was has only chance all day to go.
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Gross.
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Don’t forget the google translated description
“please the medical grade PET plastic end before the inserting. Enjoy the results!”
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