2 US senators just demanded Amazon stop spying on its workers via social media after news surfaced that the tech giant was monitoring drivers' plans to protest or strike
Trending News
Two US senators have demanded that Amazon stop spying on workers through their social media posts, per a report from Motherboard. The news comes two weeks after a separate Motherboard report revealed the company was monitoring dozens of private and public social media groups of its workers in the US, the UK, and Spain.
Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday urging the tech giant to end its "anti-worker, anti-union efforts, including the Advocacy Operations Social Listening team."
"The magnitude of this surveillance, the lengths to which Amazon went to keep it hidden from your own workers, and its admitted purpose are extremely disturbing and are indicative of just how much of a threat Amazon perceives its own workers to be," the senators jointly wrote. They called upon Amazon to instead focus their efforts on improving the company's health and safety record during the COVID-19 pandemic.In a statement to Business Insider, an Amazon spokesperson said: "We have a variety of ways to gather driver feedback and we have teams who work every day to ensure we're advocating to improve the driver experience, particularly through hearing from drivers directly. Upon being notified, we discovered one group within our delivery team that was aggregating information from closed groups. While they were trying to support drivers, that approach doesn't meet our standards, and they are no longer doing this as we have other ways for drivers to give us their feedback."
Amazon has been a staunch opponent to its workers forming a union, so much so that Amazon posted a job opening in early September for an analyst that would find employee's efforts to unionize and then report back to higher-ups. It quickly deleted the job listing after Business Insider's Aaron Holmes reached out for comment.Amazon has profited heavily during the pandemic as stay-at-home orders have driven people into their homes and onto online marketplaces. CEO Jeff Bezos has in turn seen a spike in his already colossal fortune — he is now the richest person in the world with a net worth of more than $200 billion.
Business has plummeted across multiple industries during the pandemic, and theCopyright © 2021. Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.For reprint rights. Times Syndication Service.
Next