Norwegian insurance company DNB has found itself on the receiving end of some bad publicity after its draconian crackdown on toilet breaks made worldwide news. DNB installed a surveillance system to track call center employees. If an employee spent over 8 minutes in a day on personal breaks, including time spent in the toilets, a flashing light went off to alert management to the slack employee.
Commenting on the case, Norway’s workplace ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon noted three other recent cases of Norwegian companies obsessing about their employees’ toilet habits. One required employees to sign in to the toilets. A second required employees to access toilets with a swipe card so that the number and timing of toilet breaks could be tracked. A third, most heinously, allowed extra toilet breaks for women on their period… provided that the women wore a red bracelet.
This toilet obsession is not limited to Norway. In October 2011, Spanish fruit company El Ciruelo was accused by a union of requiring female fruit packers to put a card around their neck reading ASEO (toilet) if they wished to go to the toilet, allegedly to embarrass women into holding on until their shifts were over. The company claimed this was a story made up by disgruntled employees while two other unions claimed that it was a temporary system put in place to ensure that the women only stopped work to go to the toilet if one of the three toilets (for a workforce of 150 women) was vacant, which is only marginally better.
One wonders when it will dawn on these companies that they could cut out toilet breaks altogether if they just converted employee seat into toilets, or perhaps it would be more cost-effective to hand out disposable adult diapers (and nose plugs) at the beginning of each shift.
Perhaps this is the natural consequence of a business environment where wage rises are increasingly condemned, profits come before employee welfare (especially if you’re an electronics company outsourcing your manufacturing to China) and “job creators” are held up by politicians and pundits as more important than the actual jobs they may or may not create.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, responding yesterday to a ruling of Fair Work Australia that discrimination against women had contributed to low average pay rates in the social, community and disability services industry sector (in which 80% of employees are women) compared to comparable jobs in other sectors, said “Even more alarming is the concern that the unions may try to use this decision as some sort of precedent for similar claims in female dominated sectors.” Yes, how dare any other women complain they’re underpaid compared to men! It might hurt job creators’ fee-fees!
What draconian workplace policies have you seen, dear readers?
(Image via Tantek @ Flickr
