I heard on the news today that workers at the Jim beam distillary are protesting because they aren’t allowed to go to the bathroom. One guy claimed this violated federal law.
So just what does the law say about going to the bathroom while at work? How many times can you go, and for how long? Could i just hang out in the John all day and claim the law was on my side?
At a seminar I attended on proper ways to increase produictivity, a bad example was made of an outfit (I think they did airline reservations or were otherwise travel connected) that timed all telephone calls with the customers (which were never to exceed 2 minutes) and required log-out and log-in from the duty stations in order to use the can. Too frequent or too long head calls was grounds for “counselling” and then dismissal. I believe employees were held to an aribtrary standard of something like 10 minutes (total) per day.
Actually that sounds like standard practice at most call centers that I’m aware of. The act of logging in and out though is done by codes punched into your telephone system and those codes are recorded by a central programming to analyse how you spend your time. Every call center has a goal “average handle time” for calls and exceeding (or chronically coming in WAY under) is frowned upon. I worked in employee management for a call center once upon a time and it was truly mind boggling how much time went to waste if people were left unchecked. 30 minute bathroom breaks (right after their scheduled lunch), sitting with the customer on hold just to avoid doing work, calling out on personal business, dropping calls (immediately hanging up or transferring them for no reason), sitting with an open line but with nobody else on the phone… all of this adds up. It’s a shame you have to watch people so carefully and cannot trust them to responsibly and professionally do their jobs.
Presumptuous, much? Perhaps it’s the manager’s expectations that should be reconsidered. Maybe there’s a limit to how much boring, repetitive, unrelenting work one person can do continuously for hours on end. How about working in a 10-minute break for each 50 minutes work? How about allowing employees to structure their own schedules so that every minute of their time isn’t examined?
I can understand that the call-centre managers are frustrated that they can’t get all their employees to stay “on” minute-by-minute, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, month-upon-month, but maybe that’s an unrealistic expectation. These are human beings, after all, not machines.