Pregnant T-Mobile Employee had to Clock Out to Use Toilet
 

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs...100119456.html



Kristi Rifkin had been working at T-Mobile Call Center in Nashville for four years when she got pregnant with her third child. She says she loved her job.

"I had a great run," Rifkin, 40, told ABC News. "I was making bonus. T-Mobile was good to me. I never had a problem getting a schedule I wanted. I enjoyed it. I had even left another company to work at T-Mobile because they had great benefits."

But her good will toward the company changed once she got pregnant.
According to Rifkin, the pregnancy-her second (she has one stepson)-was a difficult one, and she was going to the doctor twice a week, seeing both a regular obstetrician and a high-risk obstetrician. She was also required to drink "tons and tons" of water - which, in turn, resulted in frequent trips to the bathroom. This did not sit well with T-Mobile, she said.

"They give you two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch," said Rifkin. "If you can't take care of your biological needs in that time period, you don't go."
Before her pregnancy, this wasn't an issue. But as she explained in a blog post on MomsRising.org, frequent jaunts to the bathroom would cut into what was known in the call center world as "adherence" - a metric that measures the degree to which employees meet their quota for being on the phone.

"You have different numbers you have to meet each month, and if you don't meet them they can fire you," she said. "The thinking is that if you're off the phone and you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, then there are customers waiting to talk to you."

She tried to hold off on eating and drinking; she needed the health insurance the job provided. But the baby was suffering, Rifkin said, and she had to start drinking water again.

Finally, she said, her supervisor pulled her aside and told her to get a note from her doctor explaining that she needed to go the bathroom often. "At that point, I thought my head was going to launch off my shoulders," said Rifkin. "'Are you serious? I need to get a note from my doctor to go to the toilet?' This is a basic biological need.'"

But Rifkin did as she was told; she got the doctor's note and cleared it with Human Resources. She was told that she could use the rest room any time she needed to, she said, but that she would have to clock out. When she returned from that bathroom, she would have to clock back in. "This meant I was out of work for five minutes," she said. She had to write the hours down and turn it into her supervisor, just to make sure she wasn't taking advantage of the situation.

"I ended up using my vacation time to use the bathroom," she said.
But she still wasn't eating and drinking as she was supposed to. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She was stressed and anxious.

She finally went on the Family Medical Leave Act, which requires employers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to eligible employees, seven weeks before her son, Ian, was born, on May 14, 2010. A month and a half after she returned to work she was fired, she said.

The reason? Rifkin says she was summarily fired after she failed to remove an extra-charge feature from a customer's account, the commission for which was 12 cents. She says the rare error occurred when she either forgot to remove the charge or removed another charge instead.

She got no severance, she said, and now pays for medical expenses out of pocket.
Rifkin said she has no plans to sue the company; it's too expensive, and Tennessee is an at-will employment state. "They can fire you for any reason," she said
The US. Department of Labor reports that only eight states require paid rest periods and Tennessee is not among them.

"There is no specific legal requirement that requires employers to let their employees use the restroom," Paula Brantner, the executive director of Workplace Fairness, which provides legal information about workers rights. However, "If a pregnant woman is the only employee being forced to clock out, and they don't require males or non-pregnant females to do so, it would seem to me that would be pregnancy discrimination."

In an email statement to ABC News, T-Mobile spokesperson Glenn A. Zaccara said that he could not comment on a specific individual. But "T-Mobile employees enjoy generous benefits including paid-time-off and short and long-term disability coverage," he said. "The company has leave of absence policies in line with regulatory requirements."
Rifkin was not impressed.

"I'm done with T-Mobile," she said. "I don't want anything to do with them anymore."

jesus.
thanks god i don't have to work at an environment like that.

I worked at an AT&T call center in Lee's Summit when I first started out with the company and it was pretty much like that. You logged in at exactly 8:00, took your breaks and lunches exactly when scheduled and never took more than 15 minutes for break and 30 minutes for lunch. At then end of the day you didn't clock out a minute early ever. At the time it didn't seem like such a big deal but I would hate to do that crap again now.

pure hell

I haven an easy fix for this lil problem.















http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UjqXoO5iwv...otahangers.jpg

What a phony company

my wife just quit her job of 10 years and started a new gig on Monday that had very similar policies. she had to log into a phone, they could monitor her calls whever they wanted to, couldn't spend too much time on the phone, but not too little. had to forward so many calls over to sales a month, but her performance review had a portion that was based on sales closed - not forwarded to the sales department.

she couldn't take it any more. Now she's at a different company and loves it so far. not on the phone every minute of everyday. she was in insurance, and she would be the person you call when you need to update your policy, have questions about it, want t file a claim etc.

So....yeah, about 90% of the people calling in were pissed off to begin with.

This kind of treatment is an everyday occurrence. Not shocking at all. When large corporations continue to buy up the smaller more worker friendly companies and implement corporate policies this is what happens. Everything sets a precedent and employees are now numbers, not people or coworkers.

This is another example of the destruction of the American dream.

I've worked for big corporate. I can confirm. It's basically modern day slavery. You are not a human being. You are a money generator, nothing more, nothing less.


The thing that always drives me crazy, CRAZY. Absolutely, bat shit ****ing crazy is when they scheduled me to work 10am - 3 am and then expect me to get home from work at 3:30 am and set my alarm clock for 8 am to go back there and after a 17 hour work day I want more than 4 hours of sleep and I want some ****ing time to relax before sleep. And they did that shit all of the ****ing time. There's nothing worse coming home from work all of the time that late at night and knowing as soon as you get home from a super long day, you don't have time to eat, or do anything, you just have to try and get as much sleep as you can, hopefully 2 or 3 hours at least.

I'm getting anxiety just writing this out right now, bringing back those memories.

I've only experienced this type of slavery here in Boston. Working in Kansas was never that bad.

Awwww jeeeze

and the worst thing is, if you dont suck it up completely 100% and smile about getting those hours and if you say one thing even in the most professional manner that you can possibly say it in. They think immediately that you don't care about the company and the only criticism that I got on my annual review, ONLY CRITICISM. The only thing that was bad on that review was and I quote him

"You like to come in and work, and when you are here you do a great job, but when the work is done, you just want to go home and that's an issue."

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I said "that's a bad thing?"

I ****ing hate working in Call Centers, they are almost all like that and getting worse. They have so many metrics, alot of them conflict each other. It is horrible.

This is true and it sucks!

JFC I had know idea what some of you go through at work.
Move to Omaha & I will teach you how to become a stoned stone mason.

Last place I worked at wouldn't even give 15 minute breaks or lunch. If you wanted those you had to clock out. Needless to say I didn't work there long.

sounds like a dream job at this point, lol

Laz thinks she should stop crying.

We take bowl breaks.

Get that gal a diaper

I want to go to there

Too Fat/Omaha

My first job was a call center for a discount broker. This shit is like this for every call center out there. Financial services, IT, customer service. All of them. Fortunately, my company had a merger with another one that had outdated systems and I abused the **** out of it my last year with the company. That was the only thing that made that job bearable.

I would never go back though. **** having your day managed down to the second.

You aren't a money generator. You are a cost generator. Big corporate wants to extract as much value from you while paying you as little as possible.

One guy gets stoned at work, while everyone else is baffled at why corporations have strict rules to keep workers productive. LMAO


Seriously though, if not for treating workers like human beings, I'd thing a company like T-Mobile would consider the bad publicity in a situation like this... and like the person said, she loved the job until a few idiots playing by the book screwed it up.

In general though, not including the stupidity in the article, I understood why there were call center metrics/rankings only a few months after working at one... people wasted all kinds of time on calls and between calls, and it wasn't even that busy of a call center. People would bitch about the metrics without even being able to take a few calls in a row without wasting 10 minutes cackling about the weather or some crap.

Well honestly, if she chose a different field then she wouldn't have to deal with this. She can go back to school and get a degree in something that doesn't require that BS.

Except that whole; having to work with and associate with LiveSteam thing.

There's a difference between reasonable metrics and the extreme micromanagement that happens in today's call centers. The one I worked in had a variance for "after call" work that was ridiculously small IIRC it was 3 minutes for the entire day. That was for a discount broker where we had to enter notes about every phone call and possibly call other departments after a client had disconnected the call.

Leave DC in DC Nancy

Depended on who you asked on whether they were reasonable... some people were baffled at the top performers' numbers. As far as 3 minutes/day of after call work... did anyone ever hit that? Seems pretty insane, but the top performers should set that bar... in a situation like that, if the best anyone ever does is 20 minutes in a day, then the metrics are useless and those in charge of setting them are idiots if they don't adjust.

I made it a week and a half at a call center a long time ago. Some place in Lawrence KS when I first moved there for college. Most boring job ever, I couldn't stand it at all. They weren't micro managing the shit out of us or anything, but it was just too ****ing boring sitting there for 8 hours on a phone. God, I couldn't stand that job at all.

ROFL That's rich coming from the person who loves to hang from my short and curlies.

You dnt shave your puss? nasty woman

The metrics there were designed so that no one ever hit all of them so they could limit bonus payouts. I was a stand out in every position I had there and could never hit all of the metrics. It was ****ed.

This. Huge corps are worthless shitbags. **** every one of them.
Posted via Mobile Device

at least they didn't make her pick up gum wrappers ...

I work for a very large company. I am, generally, left alone to do my job. I have almost no supervision on a daily basis. In fact in the last three weeks my boss wasn't even there for half of my shifts and missed two days completely. I have a small list of tasks that I need to perform by the end of the week, and then I keep myself busy with work related projects that I create throughout the day/week/over time. The pay and benefits are great for my geographic area too.

sounds pretty solid

Must be rough having to work while you're at work.

Call center work is a terrible, thankless job. And the reason its like that is because consumers, thats everyone on the board, demand 24/7 service and its reeruned. We're doing this to other people. Think about it.

Call center workers are generally unskilled workers who are being paid far beyond what the work merits.

Had a friend who quit working at a call center. The best job offer she's had in 2 years is at 10 dollars less per hour than what she was being paid at her terrible job. It's a job usually reserved for women, while unskilled men have to go break their backs for 14 bucks an hour. Boo-hoo. Yeah, I know it's a shitty thankless job... that's why they're so overpaid. The majority of unskilled workers have jobs equally as shitty and often for far less money.

If you want a better job, acquire skills. Answering the phone isn't a skill. If monkeys could talk, they would do it.

**** T-Mobile. Their product sucks.
Damn 40 years old and pregnant. Got a late start.

It sucks but, by her own admission, the job worked fine for her before she became pregnant. You're in a position where they are trying to wring out every bit of efficiency because from most big businesses perspective you are a cost that is hurting their shareholders.

I'm not sure why they needed a doctors note for her to clock out to use the restroom. Seems unnecessary

They probably fired her for using her FMLA which is screwed up but that's what huge corps do. She became an employee who was more costly than somebody they could replace her with

I think unions tend to take things too far but at will is pretty messed up imo. We had a guy take a contract job for us a couple of years ago. He'd been with a company for 8 years and one day they dismissed him with no reason. He asked but they wouldn't give him anything. Almost a decade of his life and they couldn't even bother to give him a reason or any closure.

I write training material for a Fortune 50 company, and a lot of it is for our call center. Previously, I was a training/delivery specialist (teacher). Call centers are just a different beast.

The nature of the beast makes it a tough place for pregnant women with extra needs. That's why FMLA is in place. Best advice to her would have been to get on FMLA as SOON as the doctor started giving her special instructions.

The other side of call centers is that it typically is very difficult to fire somebody from that job. There are levels of discipline that must be reached before termination (warnings/escalations of warnings, censures, etc.), at least typically.

Call centers try to control burn rates, because training costs are extremely high.

If she was fired for what is mentioned in the article, it's likely there were incidents before that to put her on an "escalated" status (probably stemming from the extra time off the phone she was taking to use the bathroom).

Call centers are a tough environment and not for everyone. I sure as hell couldn't do that job and am glad I don't have to do it.

That's how mine is. I can even pretty much set my own hours.

And I'm not saying this lady did this, but I once worked with a guy that would literally stay in the bathroom for a total of like 90 minutes a day. I knew him well, and he was a good guy, but I think he got burned out.
Like 5 times a day he would "go to the bathroom." Which would entail him slowly walking to the bathroom, stopping for a few minutes to talk to someone, disappearing into the bathroom for 10-15 minutes and then slowly walking back, stopping to talk to someone along the way. So, the process of "going to the bathroom" was this 20-25 minute process.

I can't believe how stupid Corporations are. It's so ****ing simple to run a good business, but people can't wait to get in the way to **** it up with inane rules and policies. :shake:

Me too. I work for one of the largest and widest reaching companies you can imagine. I flex my time however I want. Don't say ALL companies are bad just because you had a bad experience.

That is the only justification for some managers' existence. I know a lot of middle-manager types that do that. Their job is to define policy; problem is they have no concept of process improvement. The result, inane rules and policies.

Spoken like a person who's never done the work. It's takes a ton of skill to do these jobs. You just don't know what those skills are.

These rules and policies might seem inane to anyone who has not worked in a call center environment, especially if you haven't worked in one on the management/planning side of thing.

To stay open, a call center in the U.S. must do its job at a cost-effective level. If the costs spiral out of control, most companies look to foreign solutions (which everyone hates, right?)

To be cost-effective, a call center must (among other things based on the individual line of business:
1) Meet contractually guaranteed service levels (i.e. percent of calls answered in the first 90 seconds)
2) Meet service levels without large amounts of ongoing overtime
3) Keep turnover (or "burn") rate low enough that training costs don't skyrocket (only other solution would be lowering the amount spent on training, which leads to poorer performers and a higher burn rate. Nasty cycle).

There's an incredibly difficult amount of planning and forecasting that call centers must do. To be effective at forecasting, schedule adherence - what Ms. Rifkin ran into - must be maintained and enforced. Here's an example:

Company A's workforce management department forecasts that 9 calls will come in at 10 am today, and 9 more will come in every ten minutes thereafter. Let's just say this call center has an average handle time of 9 minutes (which is long). It has an 80 percent service level. To meet that service level, it needs to have 8 people on the phone at 10 am, and 8 people at 10:10, so on. Accordingly, it schedules 8 people to start at 10, and 8 more to start at 10:30 (to handle the overflow of calls and catch up to the deficit).

If everybody is there and on time and adheres to the schedule - and nothing unexpected happens - Company A will remain within service levels. Most companies cheat to the high side (have too many people on the phone initially to prepare for unexpectedly high call volumes) and offer voluntary time off if they end up having too many people scheduled. But that doesn't always work, and starts to break down as people call in sick, take extra time off the phones, etc.

But let's say Ms. Rifkin is one of the 8 people scheduled to start at 10 am. She's late getting to work that morning because she had to stop and use the restroom on the way to the office. That means one call that should have been answered at 10 is not, and the call center starts falling behind. Every time Ms. Rifkin has to use an unplanned bathroom break, the call center falls behind.

That's what is at play here. It all comes down to the nature of the work. If it's extremely timely and every second LITERALLY counts (like in a call center), the company must have strict adherence rules. If it is less timely and critical, the company can afford t have less strict guidelines about bathroom usage/time away from the desk.

meh - middle management doesn't get to decide that much in my opinion. I fault executives and investors that are looking for a short term windfall when companies are run that poorly.

I work for a decent sized company myself and sometimes I loathe that the executives have been such old fogies, but they do seem to be truly looking at the long term interests and genuinely care about their employees. Right now it's a very good place to have a career with a good work/life balance, but that will probably change in the next 10 years as they retire and are replaced by external execs that have been trained to think of people as expendable resources. We already have a new CEO that's instituting Jack Welch's fire the bottom 10% every year bullshit. That will be fine for a few years as we have some dead weight, but then we will start cutting into good people.

I won't pretend that, not having kids, it doesn't irritate me that having kids is basically an excuse for anything at work. Late? Kids. Out today? Kids. Can't work this weekend like everyone else is? Kids. Need your vacation request to take priority over someone else's? Well, its cause of the kids. Oh, you don't have kids? Then obviously you have no excuses for any of the above.

Spoken like a manager at a call center. :shake:

While I'm in this boat with you, I still don't think it's right to discriminate against her due to being pregnant.

**** that. You know what kind of people that people who answer phones have to deal with?

I don't think they are discriminating. She's being held to the same standard as everyone else.

Man, it's been a long time since I've worked for a big corporation. I don't miss it to be honest. But I will say that not all big companies are bad and evil. And we do work in a free market environment. If you don't like it, go get a different job. If you can't get a different job, you better sack up and do your work.

Reasonable accommodation.

"Bitch should have never got pregnant. Her choice. I say, let her and the baby starve to death. Entitlements are killing this country. Leech!" - The CP DC Section

Meh.

No shits given.

Oh, how cute. DC here in the lounge.

The problem is the rules need to be enforced equally, to the benefit/detriment of all employees. We all know that in a business there are high/medium/low achievers. I can't tell you how many times I do a slow burn because I get someone elses problems to solve because I'll get it done.

I think they've made a "reasonable accommodation", she's allowed to go to the bathroom as much as she wants so long as she clocks out.

She is not disabled, her pregnancy has no impact on her ability to perform any of the essential functions of a call center job.

Paying someone who isn't working is not a reasonable accommodation. Allowing her unlimited bathroom breaks when no one else gets this privilege is, I think.

If I were her manager I would be looking the other way just as good business, but this isn't an ADA issue

You don't know how many times an hour she was saying she had to use the bathroom, so how do you know whether they were making reasonable accommodations or not?

My friends used to joke about "Being paid to take a shit".


I told them how much they were costing their employer per year by pooping on the clock. 40 employees x 15 minutes = 600 minutes of work lost. 600 minutes = 10 hours x $20/hour = $200 lost per day.

$200x300 days = 60K. Shocking.

Affinitas?

That's the tough part... at a job like that, it's so easy to tell if people around you are doing their job, and if one person gets the benefit of 2 or 3 extra breaks (even if it's just going to the bathroom), people will complain and try to stretch the rules as far as possible.

Of course, the article focuses on 'going to the bathroom' to generate attention, even though it's pretty clear that the doctor's note was about the requirement to drink a ton of water. It just sounds more ridiculous to say she needed a note to go to the bathroom. Anyone could drink a ton of water at work to avoid doing their job. Clocking out is kind of dumb, IMO, depending on how often we're talking about... it's probably better for the company to just let that slide or ask her to simply work an extra 15-30 minutes/day instead of possibly creating a media shitstorm over something like that.

yup, that's the name of it.

The male employees did not have to clock out everytime they went it was not being enforced equally

First in with shut up stupid.

Gotta show that growth story to keep the stock price up and keep the executive bonuses flowing. Can't just run a nice profitable company and pay out a dividend or anything. So if your core businesses isn't growing you have to always be squeezing more out of your existing customers or employees. Fun times.

Requiring adherence from call center employees is not about profit margin. It is about running a call center.

Without schedule adherence standards, no call center would operate efficiently or correctly.

So, just don't get pregnant, and you'll be fine.

If the doctor puts her on bedrest and she can't come in at all, should they still have to pay her, in your opinion?

No, that's what FMLA is for.

Are you aware that she'd be "clocked out" if she took FMLA?

You run something efficiently so that you have a higher profit margin. Otherwise they could easily up staff a bit and cover these situations. They just don't care about these people because they don't have great options.

This. If it's that big of a problem, allow her to work extra. Especially if the "time away from her desk" is what the fuss is all about.

I'm not sure about every state, but a lot of states you have to be clocked out for a full 30 minute break or you get paid for it. 29 minutes off the clock, they legally have to pay you.

And some employees will exceed expectations and be rewarded. Others will meet expectations and fall in the middle. And the bottom performers will gripe.