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."

[cockeyes]

Originally Posted by luv

No, that's what FMLA is for.

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

[ChiliConCarnage]

Originally Posted by duncan_idaho

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.

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.

[luv]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

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.

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.

[Bump]

Originally Posted by cockeyes

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

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.

[HonestChieffan]

Originally Posted by duncan_idaho

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.

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

[Strongside]

[luv]

Originally Posted by cockeyes

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

She was willing to clock out in order to go to the bathroom. They fired her for a 12 cent error. I don't know that whole story, if she had priors and whatnot, but, according to the facts as presented, it just sounds like there was retaliation on the company's part. Of course, I don't know what the company policy is on having errors.

[J Diddy]

Problem solved.

[cosmo20002]

This seems a little more classy.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by KC Jones

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 work for a major media company that is hugely profitable but isn't really growing their core business. So naturally they are trying to squeeze more $$ out of their employees by offshoring a bunch of development work. But they're also trying to implement new technologies and innovate at the same time. It's squeezing the life out of the few good developers we have left.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by duncan_idaho

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.

And good companies allow their managers freedom to bend the rules when it obviously makes sense. I'm going to take a wild guess that a chunk of her manager's bonus is directly tied to 'adherence' metrics.

[blaise]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

And good companies allow their managers freedom to bend the rules when it obviously makes sense. I'm going to take a wild guess that a chunk of her manager's bonus is directly tied to 'adherence' metrics.

Yeah, or she actually was a crappy employee that caused problems before this and the manager just decided to dump her.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by blaise

Yeah, or she actually was a crappy employee that caused problems before this and the manager just decided to dump her.

That is kind of what I'm thinking.

Sometimes they look for reasons to can someone.

[HonestChieffan]

Originally Posted by blaise

Yeah, or she actually was a crappy employee that caused problems before this and the manager just decided to dump her.

The bottom 20% of all performers should be seen as expendible. If they know what is expected and choose to not change and be more productive then out they go. 80% of problem employees are in that group as a general rule. You also have some top performers who create issues as well. Management has to make tough decisions that some employees will never agree with or attemt to understand. Those who do and perform do well in most companies.

[DJ's left nut]

I feel like nobody that has posted after Duncan's extremely well stated post actually read Duncan's extremely well stated post.

We have a call center in my office. The job looks like it sucks something terrible but those time standards exist because they have to exist.

"Well just let her work more later..." isn't a viable answer - someone needs to be there to take those calls and if the calls don't get taken timely, call centers default on time-standards and end up fired.

Yes, it's only one person and 5 minutes here and there may not be the end of the world, but the rules exist for a reason and the rules in these instances are not arbitrary and mean-spirited. They're generally built around the requirements put in place by the people that have contracted out with these call centers.

The alternative? Everyone gets fired when the contract gets cancelled.

Sometimes your boss has a reason to do what he does. In fact, most times that's the case.

But by all means, continue raging against the machine.