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

[Deberg_1990]

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."

[Bump]

Originally Posted by LiveSteam

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.

sounds like a dream job at this point, lol

[The Bad Guy]

Laz thinks she should stop crying.

[LiveSteam]

Originally Posted by Bump

sounds like a dream job at this point, lol

We take bowl breaks.

[TribalElder]

Get that gal a diaper

[Bump]

Originally Posted by LiveSteam

We take bowl breaks.

I want to go to there

[Al Bundy]

Too Fat/Omaha

[KC native]

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.

[KC native]

Originally Posted by Bump

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.

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.

[Bearcat]

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


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.

[Setsuna]

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.

[Cannibal]

Originally Posted by Bump

sounds like a dream job at this point, lol

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

[KC native]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

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


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.

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.

[LiveSteam]

Originally Posted by Cannibal

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

Leave DC in DC Nancy

[Bearcat]

Originally Posted by KC native

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.

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.

[Bump]

Originally Posted by KC native

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.

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.