Tag: worker rights

Pregnant T-Mobile Employee Forced to Use Vacation Time to Go to the Bathroom [UPDATED]

UPDATED with comment from T-Mobile’s Larry Myers below

ORIGNAL ARTICLE: A former T-Mobile employee is speaking out about her terrible last few months working at a call center in Nashville, Tennessee. According to Kristi Rifkin, her ordeal started when she became pregnant with her second child and her pregnancy forced her to take a few extra breaks.

As Rifkin tells it in a blog post on MomsRising.org called Why I Believe in Paid Sick Leave, everything was going fine at her job until she got pregnant.

“It was a very, very rough pregnancy. I was taking medication to keep me from going into labor. I was going to the doctor twice a week, seeing both a regular obstetrician and a high-risk obstetrician. I had to drink a lot of water and go to the bathroom pretty frequently, which is what normal pregnant women do,” she says.

But her supervisor quickly warned her that frequent trips to the bathroom may cause her productivity to drop, which could result in her termination.

“Being on the phone was my job, so if I wasn’t, I risked being written up and possibly fired. Essentially the message was, ‘You can go, but understand that if you don’t meet that metric at the end of the day, week and month, we have the opportunity to fill your seat.’ They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use the toilet. But the reality was that this is a metric on how your job is measured and if you don’t meet it, then you do not have your job.”

Eventually, her supervisor told her that if she really had a medical necessity to use the bathroom so often, she should get a doctor’s note. Of course, she and her doctor thought it was ludicrous, but she complied.

After a sit-down with H.R., it was decided that Rifkin could use the bathroom as much as she wants, but T-Mobile wasn’t going to pay for it. That meant that she had to clock out and back in for every bathroom break.

“At the same time, I was under so much pressure to keep my sales up. I would sprint – as much as a heavily pregnant woman can — between my desk and the bathroom to make sure I squeezed every second I could out of my work day. Everything I did was scrutinized. I felt picked on. Someone was always watching over my shoulder, monitoring my performance,” says Rifkin.

In the end, she says she wound up using vacation time just to go pee.

Eventually, her doctor ordered full medical leave. The Family Medical Leave Act requires that employers provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave and job security for eligible employees – so Rifkin’s job was there when she got back after 7 weeks.

But not for long. According to ABC News, she was soon fired over what amounted to a small clerical error; apparently she “failed to remove an extra-charge feature from a customer’s account, the commission for which was 12 cents.”

“Moms shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and the health of their families. But too often, companies that are fixated on their bottom lines force women to make this choice. I know. It happened to me,” says Rifkin.

T-Mobile has made a statement. Although they won’t discuss specific employees, a spokesman said this:

“T-Mobile employees enjoy generous benefits including paid-time-off and short and long-term disability coverage. The company has leave of absence policies in line with regulatory requirements.”

UPDATE: I’ve received a lengthy and detailed comment from T-Mobile U.S. Chief People Officer Larry Myers:

Sensational headlines are hard to ignore. Here are some facts you should know:

• Of course we make reasonable accommodations for all of our employees when they need time away from servicing our customers’ needs – and we did that three years ago in 2010 for this employee.
• Our industry-standard policies have been in place since 2008 and are understood by all of our call center employees.
• Beyond the breaks that are built into every shift for all of our call center employees, we have additional flexibility to give employees the time they need – especially when there is a medical need.
• After all reasonable accommodations have been exhausted, employees have a choice – they can take additional, unpaid breaks, or they can choose to apply their paid time off benefit. These decisions do not result in adverse performance evaluations.
• When a medical situation is involved and there is even more need for time away from the job, we work closely with our employees to consider potential Leave of Absence (LOA), then consider Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) time off.
• For this particular former employee, all of these things were discussed and utilized.
• T-Mobile is a values-based organization that has 5 times in a row been awarded as one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies.” And our employees continue to tell us that they enjoy working at T-Mobile. In a recent anonymous third party employee satisfaction survey, 78% of T-Mobile’s employees said they are satisfied with their job and 83% said they are proud to work at the company, placing T-Mobile on par with the top 25% of all companies surveyed in the United States.

Please consider the facts, and judge for yourself.

Larry Myers, Chief People Officer
T-Mobile US, Inc.

May 2, 2013
What Work Is Like At An Online Retailer’s Warehouse [Infographic]

It’s almost impossible these days to avoid shopping online, at least for some things. (Let me know if you’ve achieved this. I’m curious to know how you managed.) Somehow, through the magic of logistics, it’s often cheaper and quicker to order your books, movies, clothes, even diapers from a website than to visit your local retailer. (Much to the chagrin of your friendly neighborhood “locavores” and small business owners.) A lot of people claim they’d prefer to buy locally, even at a slight markup, but a lot of times the overwhelming inventory and savings potentials are just too great online, and even your staunchest advocates of strong local economies have to cheat sometimes.

Have you ever wondered how, exactly, businesses like Amazon can keep their prices so low? One part of the answer, of course, is economies of scale: the bigger you are and the more of a product you can afford to buy at one time, the better a deal your suppliers are likely to cut you. It’s a similar principle to when you pick up five pounds of pistachios from the bulk aisle at Trader Joe’s.

But economies of scale aren’t the only thing affecting the price of books online. I live near several major distribution centers, and I’ve had tons of friends who worked in the warehouses here — some full-time, some to pay for school, and some to pick up a bit of extra cash around the holidays. Their reports are nearly unanimous: working in an online retailer’s warehouse sucks. My friends cite low pay, long or bad hours, high stress, repetitive motion, tedium, and lack of personal fulfillment among the worst of the conditions they have to contend with. Many have hurt their backs, necks, or joints while struggling to keep up with the job’s high volume quotas. Others have complained of noise, incompetence of some management and fellow employees, and the difficulty of landing a permanent position at the company among other frustrations.

This might sound like a lot of whining, but if it is, it’s pretty universal. Apparently these complaints aren’t unique to my friends, or even my neck of the woods. Here’s an infographic from Business Insurance Quotes that describes what goes on at your favorite online stores’ warehouses:

(image)
Brought to you by: Business Insurance Guide

March 21, 2012
Online Petition Tackles Apple Factory Worker Conditions

A petition on popular online petition site Change.org is gaining a lot of attention. Washington D.C.’s Mark Shields is petitioning Apple (and specifically CEO Tim Cook) to “Protect Workers Making iPhones in Chinese Factories.”

In just a few days, the petition has amassed 146,000+ signatures as of the writing of this article, and it’s progressing at an astonishing rate.

Dear Apple,

You know what’s awesome? Listening to NPR podcasts through an Apple Airport, playing through a Mac laptop, while puttering about the kitchen. Do you know the fastest way to replace awesome with a terrible knot in your stomach? Learning that your beloved Apple products are made in factories where conditions are so bad, it’s not uncommon for workers to permanently lose the use of their hands.

For awhile now, Apple has been plagued by a pretty disturbing PR crisis. Conditions inside some of their foreign manufacturing plants have been called into question – especially factories like Foxconn in China. In the past year, we’ve heard reports of mass suicides of workers at Foxconn, and just this month we reported on a mass suicide threat that was just barely avoided.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the chairman of Hon Hai, parent company to Foxconn, raised some eyebrows when he referred to the workers under his management as “animals.”

These foreign factories have been accused of numerous abuses, including refusal of pay, a lack of breaks, and improper instruction regarding toxic chemicals. A former Foxconn manager recently spoke out, saying that “Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost.”

For his part, Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly refuted these claims, saying that he takes offense to the notion that he doesn’t care about all the workers under the Apple umbrella:

As a company and as individuals, we are defined by our values. Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly. We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.

Nevertheless, here’s what is demanded by the petition:

Here are two simple asks (basically taken from the end of the TAL report) that could make a profound difference in the lives of the men and women in your factories and others like them:

First, in regards to the worker traumas described in the story, ranging from suicide attempts to the people losing the use of their hands from repetitive motion injuries, we ask that Apple release a worker protection strategy for new product releases, which are the instances when injuries and suicides typically spike because of the incredible pressure to meet quotas timed to releases.

Second, since the TAL story aired, Apple has announced that the Fair Labor Association will be monitoring its suppliers. Awesome step. Please publish the results of FLA’s monitoring, including the NAMES of the suppliers found to have violations and WHAT those violations are, so that there is transparency around the monitoring effort.

Please make these changes immediately, so that each of us can once again hold our heads high and say, “I’m a Mac person.”

150,000 signatures in a few days is a highly successful petition. It seems that the issue isn’t just going to go away. It’s hard for people to look at their devices that they rely on and love so much and think about the possible suffering that went into their construction.

But the real question when it comes to this issue: would people really change their purchasing habits? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

[Image Courtesy cultofmac]

January 31, 2012