I am critiquing the Raikoth anti-libertarian FAQ and I stumbled on this section:
I note in the same vein stories from the days before labor regulations when employers would ban workers from using the restroom on jobs with nine hour shifts, often ending in the workers wetting themselves. This seems like the sort of thing that provides so much humiliation to the workers, and so little benefit to the bosses, that a free market would eliminate it in a split second. But we know that it was a common policy in the 1910s and 1920s, and that factories with such policies never wanted for employees. The same is true of factories that literally locked their workers inside to prevent them from secretly using the restroom or going out for a smoking break, leading to disasters like theTriangle Shirtwaist Fire when hundreds of workers died when the building they were locked inside burnt down. And yet even after this fire, the practice of locking workers inside buildings only stopped when the government finally passed regulation against it.
We’ve covered the TSF thing before, so I am not looking for arguments against that specifically (though I would appreciate any you might have). I am more interested in the bathroom break thing. Why would employers do this? Did it really take away that much from employment time? What are some citations on this. How widespread was the issue? Was this a long-term problem or was it restricted to a few situations?
employers want to get the most profit from workers. that means treating workers like shit if they do certain jobs. the less power the workers have the better according to investers and consumers. thats why we have people cheering when people workers get fired and when workers lose benefits and when workers lose pensions. a boss would love it if a worker paid the boss to work.
just like going for labor willing to work for the cheapest price, and loving a surplus in people looking for employment to drive down wages, companys want to have people that spend the most time working.
Another thing I can think of is that we didn’t have a truly free market due to the government interventions in favor of business.
Cab21 - I had seen that article before and it doesn’t really add anything to the discussion over the 1910s and 1920s.
There is one section that may be of interest - the one that says that judges treated employees as property of employers. If this was a cause of the problems, then this is a failure of government rather than a failure of property rights. However, establishing that link would be tenuous and difficult.
Fact checking that FAQ is annoying because there are hardly any references to the facts that are claimed. As such, I can’t make sure that it’s not just misinterpreting the history. Making this my only criticism, however, appears to be quite weak…
Maybe people accept this in the workplace because it was forced on them in school. Reading one of the hits, it’s amazing how controlled and watched students are.
Though I don’t want to focus too much on TSF, could it be argued that locking the people into the factory isn’t very libertarian? After all, it’s akin to imprisonment.
if the job requirement needs someone who can be there for a full shift in the assempy line, stoping to take a break could mean shutting down the line or needing additional workers who can fill in, costing money and production time.
Lolol! I find this very hard to believe. What kind of patronizing crap is this? I’m a worker nowadays and on the off chance the bosses ever got the idea to lock the “restrooms” we sure as hell wouldn’t “wet ourselves” as a result. We’d probably go and piss all over the doors to the foreman’s office or some such. Lol, workers “wetting themselves”, because when you can’t find a restroom the only option remaining is to “wet yourself”?
In practice even in such a situation the workers can take breaks if they don’t do it all at once. As one goes for a cigarette a few of the others pick up the slack for him.
I don’t know about America in 1910s or whatever, but as I said I find this hard to believe. What I may find plausible (albeit unlikely) is that restrooms would be locked for most of the work time, and only unlocked every two hours or so, for ten minutes, or something like that. Else if you’re going to keep the restrooms locked why even build them in the first place? Just have a factory without restrooms. (Since apparently you do not at all mind piss pilling up in the corners of the assembly hall.)
And the only scenario of workers “wetting themselves” I can conjure up in my mind would have to involve somebody extremely drunk, or else some sort of a newly arrived and timid labourer, who was afraid that if they left their post to take a leak they wouldn’t make their quota.
Having been in probably 200 factories in the USA and outside the USA, all in the Western Hemisphere, I can say that I have never seen a factory where they locked the bathroom. Moreover the cleanliness of the work environments in Central and South America is on par with that of the USA. And to their benefit they don’t have all of these foolish bureaucarcy through regulations that increases the cost of their product with no benefit to the customers. The reason is simple: CUSTOMERS DEMAND PRODUCTS WITHOUT POOP.
The ONLY place where I ever saw a crazy restriction like this was in the USA where the management attempted to reduce the amount of toilet paper and paper towels used. It was as disaster and cost them a lot more time in dealing with employees with wet hands and clogged toilets than they saved in money.
Meanwhile the Socialist relic I work in has these rostfrei crapholes in the ground in place of toilets and garden water hoses instead of paper. It’s really grand. The shittier the conditions the less I have to worry about anybody being crazy enough to come work here and underbid me.
Marko, that’s what I’d think. But the blog cab21 links says this:
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.
All the lawsuits in the world would not have had as much impact as the local media outlet going up to the plant with cameras and asking management why the employees making popular flavorings have to wear their own urine. Now with the internet this message could go out with extreme speed and it would hurt sales.
The article about the pregnant woman is full of entitlement mentality. In a way, how often you need to use the restroom is like being strong, tall, or some other aspect which can affect how well you do on the job. Using the restroom much more often than another employee in general means that you’re working less, so why shouldn’t an employer be able to choose people or pay based on this frequency? It may be that most people are so triggered by this that they would refuse to work anywhere that did this, so employers would have to refrain from it if they wanted anyone working for them.
It’s also interesting how this ties in to how much women are paid on average versus men, as an example of something that can decrease a woman’s productivity but not a man’s (though if you take into account all the conditions that can cause one to have to pee more often, it might be that their frequencies for the sexes cause the productivity effect to even out).
If there’s no cost to taking restroom breaks, an employee might go more often than necessary, perhaps just to take a rest from working. There’s also the aspect of a person being able to trade off discomfort for reduced restroom frequency. People do this all the time at home, for example when they’re doing something they are immersed in and don’t want to have interrupted.
So they forbid urination breaks while working. In Russia, people working in such conditions would just piss on the floor somewhere, or somewhere nearby, and the low level supervisor would probably do the same.
When is the last time you saw somebody spit on the floor in the USA inside a building? OF course, only in bad conditions, but Europe is full of places so dirty that nobody even bothers to wash their cups, because they are cleaner than what’s around anyway.
I think people have a different mentality in the USA. Partly because people are conditioned that way, to put up with it, in school, and feel social pressure if they don’t hold it in until “allowed” by authority. Same in Russian schools actually, but in Russia people get into the real world sooner and realize how rubbishy conditions are and just go ahead and do it.
Speaking of which, I am no longer interested in drinking Nabisco or A-1 (not that I ever bought it more than a couple times before). The people have what, infections and are covered in urine while they make it?
And yes, California etc are not free markets, neither are European places. They could put into a contract with the workers to provide devices in which to urinate in, used in the military, for about 200-400 USD for men-women, which are either provided by the company to workers each year or paid for by workers if they agree to work there, but it has to be in the contract, otherwise this is not a free market solution. “We forbid you to piss!” = “We forbid rain to occur on Tuesdays”
The point, however, is that given that at the time people were banned from doing this, government could have stepped in and “improved” a market outcome.
