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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mistermj who wrote (211843)	1/5/2007 5:07:21 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I don't know if there are statistics on the fact that teachers don't have anyone to cover for them in their class for simple things like getting a drink and going to the bathroom. I would be happy to find some statistics if they were out there, but sadly, I'm afraid the data has not been compiled. In no school my children have attended, or in which I have worked, has there been a system in place a teacher could use to get someone to babysit the class in order to get a drink, or grab a cup of coffee. If you can find data on this, I would be happy to discuss it with you Freakonomics fashion- but until then I must just assess the data as I have seen it. Have you ever been to a school that lets teachers wander out of their rooms when they want a drink, or to take care of some personal thing? And if you could lose the name calling that would be such a little slice of heaven.

To: mistermj who wrote (211843)	1/5/2007 5:14:53 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Looking for stats I found this: Oh to be an autoworker.... 48 minutes in the potty, per shift (and they get a food break on top of that). Pretty nice. ........ Bring Your Own Depends Most readers are probably tired of reading about the automotive industry, but we cannot let today's news from Detroit pass without comment. It seems as though Ford is cracking down at its truck plant in Wayne, Michigan on employees violating a term of the labor contract that limits time in the restrooms to 48 minutes per 8 hour shift. The UAW, of course, thinks such pressure is unfair. A manufacturing consultant by the name of Sandy Munro (probably a soon to be ex-Superfactory reader) says, "It's a giant throwback to the bad old days of the '70s and '80s, when you squeezed the guy at the bottom of the heap any way you could. That only causes lots of discontent, and only someone from Harvard could think of something as stupid as monitoring bathroom time." Just a few thoughts on the matter: I have hammered the management of Ford and others to take responsibility for the agreements they entered into with labor. No one held a gun to their head, so they need to stop whining and hold up their end. The same goes for the UAW. Why on earth someone wasted time and paper writing legal agreements about bathroom time is a mystery to me, but they did. So shut up, UAW, you signed it so honor the deal. Second no healthy person spends 10% of their waking life in the bathroom. Do the math. If the employees at the Ford plant cannot live within a 10% bathroom cap, they should either seek medical help or bring their own box of Depends with them when they come to work. Has the world gone mad? According to the Harbour Report, the labor cost per vehicle in the U.S. is a little better 20% of the total. So a car or truck with a total cost of $15,000 includes $300 for somebody sitting on a toilet. How could Ford have been so insane as to agree to this? How can the UAW defend it and call it nitpicking to keep it from being even higher? How can a manufacturing consultant belittle Ford for trying to cap the toilet time cost per vehicle at $300? Do any of these people think they can compete with Nissan, Toyota or Honda with insanity like this in their cost structure? Take the math a step further. Buy a Ford, finance it for five years so you have 60 payments. That means every Ford owner is taking a five dollar bill out of his or her pocket every month and putting it into the pocket of some guy sitting in an outhouse in Detroit. Sorry, UAW, Sandy Munro, Fox News and the rest of the media who are making Ford out to be petty nitpickers. American manufacturing cannot continue to serve as the backbone of the economy when ten cents out of every labor dollar goes to someone sitting on the can. It's not nitpicking. It is common sense. Posted by Bill Waddell \| Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: typepad.com Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Bring Your Own Depends:

To: mistermj who wrote (211843)	1/5/2007 5:19:21 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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