Bezos housekeepers ‘not allowed any lavatory breaks’

A FORMER housekeeper for Jeff Bezos claims that she and other employees suffered unsafe working conditions that included being forced to climb out of a laundry room window to get to a lavatory when the Amazon founder’s family was at home.

In a lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle this week, Mercedes Wedaa, a longtime housekeeper for wealthy city residents, including Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, contends that she sometimes worked up to 14 hours a day but was never told she was entitled to rest breaks. She also says there was no room designated for the housekeepers to rest in and that they sometimes ate meals in a laundry room.

When the Bezos family was at home, the housekeepers were allowed to enter the house only to perform cleaning functions, her lawsuit says.

According to the complaint, that created situations in which they could not exit the laundry room because its only door led into the residence.

Instead of going out of that door, housekeepers for a period of 18 months would sometimes have to climb out of the laundry room window on to a path that led to a mechanical room, enter through there, and go downstairs to a bathroom.

“Because there was no readily accessible bathroom, plaintiff and other housekeepers spent large parts of their day unable to use the toilet even though they needed to,” the complaint says.

“As a result of this, the housekeepers frequently developed urinary tract infections.”

Harry Korrell, an attorney for Mr Bezos, called the claims absurd.