Amazon ‘ambassadors’ defend working conditions at warehouses

A group of Amazon employees known as “FC ambassadors” began tweeting again about how great it is to work at Amazon.

When the ambassadors see others on social media discussing the brutal working conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers, its anti-union actions or anything else unflattering about the company, they step in to offer an on-the-ground perspective, reports The New York Times.

They are, at once, warehouse workers and public relations representatives. One ambassador, going by the name Hannah, responded to a thread on Thursday that described poor treatment of Amazon’s workers.

“I suffer from depression too, and at one point I wanted to quit Amazon,” she wrote. “But I realized it was my fault for the problems I was dealing with, and not Amazon’s. I’m allowed to talk to people, but sometimes I don’t want to. Now I have some great coworkers to pass the nights with.”

The FC ambassadors were introduced in 2018 and first attracted attention about a year ago.

“FC ambassadors are employees who work in our FCs and share facts based on personal experience,” said Lindsay Campbell, a spokeswoman for Amazon. “It’s important that we do a good job educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that along with the FC tours we provide.”

Amazon’s drafting of its employees to defend its practices is nothing new, said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. He described a similar practice a century earlier. To deal with the fallout from a massacre involving the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which John D. Rockefeller owned, the family used the company’s workers to promote its image as a model employer, despite the fact its labor practices had set off strikes that led to the massacre.

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