Amid all the online chatter about a cargo ship clogging the Suez Canal, the tweets stood out: Amazon’s media relations account last week fired off a series of condescending missives at politicians like Mark Pocan, who have criticized the company’s treatment of its employees. “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” the Amazon News account tweeted at the Wisconsin Democrat. “If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
As my colleague Bess Levin wrote, the tweets from Amazon-affiliated accounts targeting Pocan, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, among others, were unusual and led to a great many questions including: Why? We may have an answer. According to Recode, they appear to be the result of a mandate from Jeff Bezos himself to more forcefully combat criticism of the company that he and other higher-ups see as “inaccurate” or “misleading” amid a major unionization effort and continued talk of regulations from Washington. Bezos and other company leaders are said to be particularly anxious about the vote, which could make Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse the company’s first to unionize.
The vote, which will be tallied this week, has massive implications for a company that has fought employee organizing. Workers have earned support from an unlikely alliance of politicians, from Marco Rubio to Joe Biden. “When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy,” Rubio wrote in a USA Today op-ed earlier this month. “I support the workers.” Biden, meanwhile, tweeted last month that “every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union.”
While Amazon is facing pressure from all sides, it appears especially stressed about broadsides from progressives, who have championed the workers leading the union push in Alabama. As Sanders prepared to visit with the workers in the final days of the unionization vote, Amazon CEO Dave Clark took aim at the Vermont senator, implying that the company lives up to the values that he merely espouses. “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers,” Clark wrote on Twitter, “but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.”
That brought others into the fray. Pocan noted that a “progressive” workplace probably wouldn’t fight to keep employees from unionizing and that its drivers wouldn’t have to urinate in water bottles to keep up with the delivery pace—something that has been reported on, contrary to Amazon’s claims. Amazon’s PR account attacked Pocan over the tweet and Warren over comments about the company’s tax practices. “You make the tax laws,” it wrote. “We just follow them. If you don’t like the laws you’ve created, by all means, change them.”
That the order to fight back came from the very top reflects the level of Bezos’ concern about recent headwinds. Outside of his white-hot rage at the National Enquirer’s apparent attempts to blackmail him with risqué photos a couple years back, Bezos tends to be somewhat reserved in the way he handles things, largely opting for a behind-the-scenes role—though he continues to cast a large shadow over his sprawling business empire, even as he begins to pull back from it. But the union push in Alabama could bring a significant change to the way his company operates, opening the floodgates for other organizing drives in other parts of Amazon’s operations, and making it harder for the company to dismiss worker concerns. “For most companies that end up with labor organizing in some capacity,” Marc Wulfraat, a logistics consultant who follows Amazon, told the New York Times, “it didn’t come about because they were doing a fantastic job managing people.”
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