Void Where Prohibited Re: workers of the world...relax

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 3:00 AM +0000 10/1/02, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>>3) Because mindless overwork is easier than facing the "void"?
>
>Waxing Heideggerian, are we, Joanne? Is the void less empty in 
>France and Germany?

US workers have been unable to win even the right to void when they 
want -- no wonder we have the longest workweek in the industrialized 
world.

*****   Lavatory and Liberty

The secret history of the bathroom break

By Corey Robin, 9/29/2002

IN HIS NEVER-ENDING quest for control of the workplace, Henry Ford 
confronted many foes, but none as wily or rebellious as the human 
digestive tract. Hoping to tame what he called the body's 
''disassembly line,'' Ford wheeled lunch wagons into his auto plant 
in Highland Park, Mich., and forced workers to wolf down a 10-minute 
sandwich on the job. So industrialized was ingestion at the plant 
that workers growled about their ''Ford stomach.'' But where Ford 
sought to speed up the meal's entrance into the body, his successors 
- from store managers in the Midwest to fashion moguls in New York - 
have concentrated on slowing down its exit.

Today's workplace can sometimes seem like a battlefield of the 
bladder. On the one side are workers who wanna go when they gotta go; 
on the other are employers who want to stop them, sometimes for hours 
on end. Just this past month, a Jim Beam bourbon distillery in 
Clermont, Ky., was forced to drop its strict bathroom-break policies 
after the plant's union focused negative international attention - 
from ABC News to Australia - on Jim Beam and its parent company, 
Fortune Brands, Inc. According to union officials, managers kept 
computer spreadsheets monitoring employee use of the bathroom, and 45 
employees were disciplined for heeding nature's call outside 
company-approved breaks. Female workers were even told to report the 
beginning of their menstrual cycles to the human resources 
department, said one union leader.

In their 1998 book ''Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right 
to Urinate on Company Time,'' Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard of the 
University of Iowa - he's a law professor, she's a urogynecologist - 
trace the long and ignoble history of the struggle for the right to 
pee on the job. In 1995, for instance, female employees at a Nabisco 
plant in Oxnard, Calif., maker of A-1 steak sauce and the world's 
supplier of Grey Poupon mustard, complained in a lawsuit that line 
supervisors had consistently prevented them from going to the 
bathroom. Instructed to urinate into their clothes or face three 
days' suspension for unauthorized expeditions to the toilet, the 
workers opted for adult diapers. But incontinence pads were 
expensive, so many employees downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper, 
which pose severe health risks when soaked in urine. Indeed, several 
workers eventually contracted bladder and urinary tract infections. 
Hearing of their plight, conservative commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell 
Jr. advised the workers to wear special diapers used by horses in New 
York's Central Park carriage trade....

<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/272/focus/Lavatory_and_LibertyP.shtml> 
*****
-- 
Yoshie

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