JEFF: BATTLE ’ZON
Bezos tells execs to blast back at critics
At the behest of its CEO, Jeff Bezos, Amazon is hitting back at attacks on its labor and business practices from critics such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Bezos has expressed anger in recent weeks that Amazon officials are not more aggressive in pushing back against criticisms that he and other top brass deem to be inaccurate or misleading, according to tech news site Recode.
Bezos — who as the world’s richest man, with a fortune near $200 billion, has long been a target of Democrats Sanders and Warren — has directed the firm to fight back.
Last week, the e-commerce giant went after both senators in a Twitter attack that is unusually snarky for a big, buttoned-up corporation.
Central to the dustup is the largest union election in Amazon’s history at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse.
Election results will be tallied later this week, although they may not be known for weeks or months as both sides are expected to squabble over the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.
Amazon officials are on edge because if a majority of the workers vote to unionize, it could ignite a chain reaction at other facilities, with the potential to force the company to overhaul how it manages its hundreds of thousands of front-line US workers.
When news broke last week that Sanders was planning to visit Alabama in the final days of voting, top Amazon executive Dave Clark fired off a Twitter thread Wednesday that started with:
“I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace,” he said.
A few hours later, the official Amazon News media relations Twitter account, with more than 170,000 followers, hit back against Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), who had questioned Clark’s “progressive workplace” assertion by alluding to stories of Amazon’s pace of work being so demanding that workers have to “urinate in water bottles.” Amazon News tweeted in response: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work forus.”
The shift in tone of the company’s Twitter account was so abrupt that it sparked an internal query from the Amazon security team, Recode reported. “The tweets, according to the security engineer, ‘are unnecessarily antagonistic (risking Amazon’s brand) and may be a result of unauthorized access,’ ” the site said.
After Warren tweeted that she would “fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators,” the same Amazon account posted this message:
“This is extraordinary and revealing. One of the most powerful politicians in the United States just said she’s going to break up an American company so that they can’t criticize her anymore.”
Amazon did not respond to requests seeking comment. asteigrad@nypost.com