[z3c0]

It's very much "whataboutism". Best case, it's tonedeaf and overly-dismissive. Worst case, it's a deliberate distraction.

I try to follow Hanlon's Razor, so I'll go with the best case and just assume these people are unempathtic contrarians, instead of corporate shills.

[d1zzy]

Because the discussion is only focused on Amazon. If instead all such articles and complains would be "Amazon, among many other companies, give workers incentives to pee in bottles" then I would pay a lot more attention to it.

Because when you say "<insert-bad-company-of-the-day> does <insert-bad-thing-of-the-day>" which is obviously to me not unique to that company then your message sounds like meant to provoke a certain feeling against a certain company, my "manipulation" alarms start ringing and, as a protection mechanism, I stop believing everything you say. By making at least an effort to make such reporting balanced, fair and accurate you have much higher chance to get me to care.

YMMV, maybe it works for other people tho.

[tclancy]

That’s literally whataboutism. Why do we need to identify every company that does this rather than calling out the ones we know?

[andonisus]

It's not whataboutism at all. I am genuinely curious, why now and why Amazon? People did not just decide to start peeing in bottles when working for Amazon, it has been happening long before.

[jhbadger]

People did complain about other companies. A decade ago it was Walmart that was the company everyone was talking about how poorly they treated their employees (which they still do in comparison to competitors like Costco). I think the reason why Amazon is getting the focus now is because Bezos went from being merely a very wealthy man to (depending on the stock market) being literally the wealthiest man in the world. So you'd think he could afford a bit of generosity towards his warehouse workers.