Our recent response to Representative Pocan

On Wednesday last week, the @amazonnews Twitter account tweeted the following back to Representative Mark Pocan:

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

First, the tweet was incorrect. It did not contemplate our large driver population and instead wrongly focused only on our fulfillment centers. A typical Amazon fulfillment center has dozens of restrooms, and employees are able to step away from their work station at any time. If any employee in a fulfillment center has a different experience, we encourage them to speak to their manager and we'll work to fix it.

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 criticizing the comments of others.

Third, we know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed.

This is a long-standing, industry-wide issue and is not specific to Amazon. We’ve included just a few links below that discuss the issue.

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.

We apologize to Representative Pocan.