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

[mikey23545]

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

[Garcia Bronco]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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 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?

[Chief Roundup]

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

[ChiliConCarnage]

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.

[duncan_idaho]

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.

[blaise]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.