Kimmel Gets His Hands on Amazon’s Full List of Union-Busting Banned Words (Video)

We laughed

Jimmy Kimmel touched on a lot of topics during his monologue on Tuesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” from Obama’s visit to the White House earlier in the day to the NCAA basketball finals. One of the funniest moments came when he talked about the latest damning reports of anti-labor behavior by Amazon.

On Tuesday it was widely reported that following the union election victory at a shipping facility in Staten Island, Amazon has taken a weird, but still draconian path to censor employees at other locations to keep them from unionizing. According to The Intercept, Amazon has banned several words outright on its internal messaging system, mainly words that would allow employees to criticize the company or discussed collective action. Amazon has denied this report, somewhat anyway.

And in his monologue, Kimmel joked about having identified the full list of banned words, which also included anything mocking Jeff Bezos’ behavior that for a much poorer person would be called a midlife crisis.

“Over the weekend workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island were able to successfully unionize. It’s the first Amazon Union,” Kimmel said as he started the topic. “The new president of the Union said something funny. The president of the union said, ‘We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up.’”

“You know- Amazon’s had a tumultuous relationship with their employees,” Kimmel continued. “There’s a story that leaked, that says Amazon was working on an internal messaging app to boost morale. But internal company documents reveal they planned to block words that could be inflammatory, like “union” and ‘plantation.’ The filter would prevent those words from being posted.”

“Of course, Amazon is pushing back,” Kimmel said. “They say this isn’t true. But we were able to get the full list of banned words.”

Kimmel’s list starts with words you might have expected from the original Intercept report, mainly all referring to how hellish working for one of Amazon’s ‘wish fulfillment centers” is. But then it increasingly gets into specific jokes about Jeff Bezos and his space penis.

For your convenience, we’ll list the Jimmy Kimmel version of Amazon’s banned words below:

Unions
Strike,
Wages.
Restrooms,
pee bottles,
empty Dasani
Bladder Infections.
Happiness.
Life outside of work.
Home.
Going home.
I think I live at home but I can’t remember.
Help.
Help us.
Penis Rocket
Overcompensating
Dork
Space Dork
Bald Space Dork
I want to have sex with Alexa.

Watch the whole monologue above. The Amazon stuff kicks in about 4 minutes, 26 seconds in.

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