Lovely- an article on point- enjoy:
Working Conditions
Give Me a Break
Ever pause to think how lucky you are that you can leave your desk when the, um, need arises?
Apparently rest breaks during the workday gnaw at the puritanical souls of many U.S. employers, who, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, denied paid rest breaks--let alone bathroom breaks--to 25 percent of blue collar and service workers in medium and large private companies in 1993. Consider this: At a Nabisco food-processing plant in Oxnard, Calif., female assembly line workers say they were forced to wait hours to go to the bathroom and filed suit against the company in 1995, claiming they were getting bladder and urinary tract infections from the protracted waiting times.
Dickensian scenes like this are not limited to factory assembly lines, however. Teachers, pharmacists and service workers also suffer the sometimes harmful effects of irregular or nonexistent bathroom breaks.
But when the call center is humming or the class is in session, many employers are reluctant to let workers leave their posts. While the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has long mandated that toilets be available to workers, it has not said much about actually letting people use them, according to Marc Linder, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law in Iowa City, Iowa, and co-author of Void Where Prohibited (1998), a book detailing the history of the bathroom break. Last April, OSHA released a vaguely worded memo officially making the connection between workplace toilets and their intended use, but OSHA has to be more specific, Linder says. "OSHA has left itself too much room [for waffling] in its enforcement policy. If a worker has his hand raised for 30 minutes before he is allowed to go to the bathroom, is that reasonable?"
Here's one solution: Lock stingy employers in a conference room for a few hours with a big pot of coffee. We think the sympathy will flow.
--Christopher Koch
cio.com |
