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."

[ChiTown]

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.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by listopencil

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.

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.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by ChiTown

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.

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.

[Garcia Bronco]

Originally Posted by WhiteWhale

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.

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.

[duncan_idaho]

Originally Posted by ChiTown

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.

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.

[KC Jones]

Originally Posted by HC_Chief

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.

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.

[cockeyes]

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.

[alanm]

Originally Posted by WhiteWhale

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.

Spoken like a manager at a call center.

[luv]

Originally Posted by cockeyes

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.

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

[luv]

Originally Posted by WhiteWhale

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.

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

[cockeyes]

Originally Posted by luv

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

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

[Buehler445]

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.

[luv]

Originally Posted by cockeyes

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

Reasonable accommodation.

[gblowfish]

"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

[notorious]

Meh.

No shits given.