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Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks
- hereme888 7d agoAdults need permission to use a restroom?!
- throw_m239339 7d ago*slaves do. Amazon big shots must be laughing at these people who have no choice but to accept these work conditions to make ends meet, so hard. They must talk about these people like they are garbage, peasants, when Amazon yuppies are among themselves... That's what shocked me the most when I was doing odd jobs, the contempt, the disdain.
- tennisflyi 7d ago[flagged]
- AndrewDucker 7d agoThe idea that non-pregnant people shouldn't also get to use the toilet seems baffling to me. Maybe just let people use it when they need it.
- xyzelement 7d agoSounds right. On the flip side there are jobs where random bathroom breaks don't really work. EG: bus driver. So I am actually not sure how that works for a pregnat bus driver. Letting her randomly stop the bus at rush hour to pee doesn't seem fair to the commuters. Probably in practice pregnant bus drivers get assigned to a short route or something like that. I don't know the nature of Amazon warehouse work. It's possible that unscheduled bathroom breaks affect multiple people (eg, I am peeing and you are idle because you depend on me to do your task) - that's the only condition where this feels at all conscionable.
- lokar 7d agoBoth jobs already need to be designed around some expectation for how often people need to use the restroom. If individual exceptions are not feasible, they design the job so that it works for everyone.
- happytoexplain 7d agoWhat the fuck? Edit: Sorry to be brusque. You're suggesting that it's conscionable to disallow a bathroom break that would inconvenience customers or cause a fellow employee to be unable to progress? That category of work culture should be unheard of in the USA, but it's leaking in, and if we don't viciously reject it, we might as well start the country over. If bathroom breaks are frequently causing some kind of unacceptable complication, then the problem isn't the bathroom break, it's the design of the position.
- eudamoniac 7d agoAll he's saying is when Swift gets on stage and her drummer needs to pee, he's going to have to hold it instead of walking off stage in the middle of the song. Sometimes jobs require periods of required availability.
- kotaKat 7d agoTurns out depending on the metro they already solved that problem. Just let them piss. They actually do let bus operators randomly stop the bus at rush hour to pee in some cities. In Ottawa (Ontario), for instance, as long as an operator is within their 5 minute "late standard" window, they can stop and make a quick pee break or Timmy's break as long as they keep the bus in time. The busses lock down with a PIN when they get out of the seat (generated that morning at the depot) so you can't take it out of neutral anyways to try to steal it. https://www.michaelsuddard.com/2013/03/oc-transpo-condoned-timmies-run.html https://www.michaelsuddard.com/2013/03/oc-transpo-condoned-t... (Best part is this old blogpost with someone cranky over the stop as well getting shown receipts by OC Transpo that their Tim's wielding bus driver that morning was in fact running on time based on GPS data.)
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- 00ze 7d agoNo where is it written here they shouldn't Not everything needs to be a panacea to cover all edge cases Legally a specific situation is often required Imo it is a phony obligation to fragment people via feigned ignorance and willful ignorance, create liquidity of a sort in the litigation market making everyone fight the same fires over and over but that is currently how it works
- ajuc 7d ago1. they shouldn't even have to work, they should be on a paid leave 2. if they want to work - they should have preferential treatment 3. even if they are not pregnant - their bathroom breaks or the ability to sit down shouldn't be limited by their employer Reading about American work culture is uncanny. It's like people arguing about css-styling the NPE error stacktrace, and everybody just assumes the null dateOfBirth in the database and 5 levels of backend code without null checks is just how it has to be.
- ChoGGi 7d ago> 3. even if they are not pregnant - their bathroom breaks or the ability to sit down shouldn't be limited by their employer See most retail workers, and anyone behind a cash register.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- bastard_op 7d agoAt this point is anyone surprised at what Amazon will do to the plebeian workers that fuel them?
- embedding-shape 7d agoLets wait and see why the pilot who overshot the runway didn't do a go-around instead of attempting to land, pressuring airplane pilots would certainly take them to another level in my eyes.
- lotsofpulp 7d agoAt this point, do people prefer to accept a claim in a lawsuit as the truth if it happens to conform to their model of reality?
- EarlKing 7d agoWhen it comes to a company known to hire union-busters rather than deal with a burgeoning union in good faith? Yes. Yes they do.
- soniczentropy 7d ago[flagged]
- EA-3167 7d agoIf you take the time to really think through the implications of that viewpoint, you might be horrified by the outputs you get.
- distortionfield 7d agoThis is the company that literally hired the Pinkertons and has been repeatedly fined millions for labor related violations, up to and including union busting. Consider me not even an iota of surprised.
- blooalien 7d ago> Consider me not even an iota of surprised. Yeah, I followed this link specifically to see how many folks are surprised that Amazon may have did yet another vile thing to their employees, and I'm not one bit surprised to find nobody surprised by it. LOL!
- sublinear 7d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitas_AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitas_AB I've gotta take the wind out of your sails a little bit on the "Pinkerton" name.
- bathtub365 7d agoThey still exist under the Pinkerton name, they’re just a subsidiary of Securitas AB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency) https://pinkerton.com/ https://pinkerton.com/
- sublinear 7d agoYes, people realizing that for themselves was the intent of my link. This discussion about trivia we're having right now is the only mojo left in the bottle. It's the same parent company as the security guards at your local shopping mall. Pinkerton is like the "geek squad" brand of security.
- ajuc 7d agoIn any poor Eastern European country they would go for months-long paid leave long before the birth and then for months-long paid maternity leave. If they decided to work during pregnancy they would get preferential treatment. How are Americans not revolting against this bullshit is beyond me. The problem isn't even Amazon - it's the system that makes Amazon doing this shit even a possibility.
- Aurornis 7d agoI skimmed the lawsuit. As far as I can tell, the complaint is about getting 4 x 15 minute extra breaks during the day and lighter work. Amazon did grant them, but the complaint is that they didn't do it fast enough. There's also something of a disagreement where she expected to be paid for the extra hour of break time every day, but Amazon was counting it as unpaid. She was reassigned to lighter work at her request, but the complaint is that she still had to lift heavy things and they didn't give her a job where she could sit down. The word "bathroom" shows up a lot but that doesn't appear core to the lawsuit. I think an editor was engineering the headline for maximum clickbait to link back to the previous Amazon bathroom break stories. Regardless of what you think about Amazon, this reporting could use a little less clickbait and little more details from the actual lawsuit.
- FpUser 7d ago[flagged]
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- devindotcom 7d agoheadline is factual: Lawsuit: Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks and chairs all the info you point out is in the first few paragraphs, much more context also provided as well as responses from amazon and context from the women
- Aurornis 7d agoI'm talking about the actual lawsuit, which is linked in the article. That's what I was reading. Amazon did grant extra breaks. The dispute is that they didn't grant them fast enough and that she expected to be paid for them, among other things. Obviously nothing will ever satisfy people who are out for blood and would never give a corporation the benefit of the doubt, but I'm trying to point out that the headline's implication that pregnant workers weren't allowed any bathroom breaks is false.
- gblargg 7d ago[flagged]
- insanitybit 7d agoOnce a day I see a comment somewhere on the internet and go "Yes, perfect, this is the dumbest thing I'll read today. Great, that's out of the way". This is the one today!
- gblargg 7d agoI'm honestly baffled. Is there something factually incorrect about what I wrote? Ad hominem doesn't help. Also, why so hostile? I meant nothing malicious by it. EDIT: I looked it up, and the legal definition of discrimination is almost Orwellian: not discriminating is legal discrimination, since it uses equality-of-outcome instead of equality of opportunity (equity vs equality), the source of the confusion here. They want different treatment (discrimination between people), which the law defines as non-discrimination. Being treated the same (no discrimination between workers) is discrimination.
- black6 7d agoIt amuses me when adults need permission to perform basic human needs because a small group will always take advantage of common courtesy and ruin it for everyone else. When I was in grade school I pissed my pants in the library because the librarian wouldn't let me go to the bathroom. We both learned a lesson that day. I learned to seek forgiveness over permission, and she learned that sometimes kids aren't bullshitting when they say they need to use the bathroom. We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile.
- genxy 7d agoI believe you have it reversed sir, we are at the mercy of the top 0.5% I doubt the librarian learned anything.
- black6 7d agoThe warehouse manager certainly isn't in the top 0.5%. Ask yourself why bathroom break policies exist in the first place.
- genxy 7d agoNo the warehouse manager most definitely punches down, just like their boss wants them to. Don't punch down, punch up.
- thrance 7d agoThe warehouse manager has quotas very hard to meet without using illegal tactics like this, and the suits above picked someone psychopathic enough to fill that role, to ensure they would actually break the law to meet said quotas.
- Yizahi 7d agoMeanwhile St. Bezos loudly complains that people are unfairly presenting billionaires as villains :)
- EarlKing 7d ago...while looking like a discount Lex Luthor.
- Henchman21 7d agoHe doesn't even have a mustache to twirl for fucks sake!
- stuaxo 7d agoIt didn't take long for people to appear in here to say it's not too bad.
- ryandrake 7d agoHN has a sizable contingent of commenters who reliably show up to defend billion and trillion dollar corporations and reprehensible corporate behavior. I honestly can't explain it without alleging astroturf.
- Henchman21 7d agoI assume they're bots
- scarecrowbob 7d agoLook, just because someone doesn't have a functioning soul doesn't mean they are a bot.
- sensanaty 6d agoThey see themselves as the future Musks and Bezos' of the world, or at the very least are either employed by, or have vested interests into their companies
- seanmcdirmid 7d agoI'm going to say its bad, but especially bad for low paid blue collar workers. When I worked at McDonalds as a kid, a lot of crew would get pregnant and work until 8 months, and be gone for a couple of months, I don't know how they did it, and I don't know why it had to be like that. Richer white collar workers have it better (much much much better), still not great. Our nation is just failing at this, I don't see Amazon being especially bad beyond the typical bad (which is already too bad). Best case is they just outsource their problem to the lowest bidder and the same or worse behavior happens.
- temporary_red 7d ago[flagged]
- josefritzishere 7d ago[dead]