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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

Why do employers deny their employees toilet breaks? Do they actually believe it makes the employees more productive, or are they just cruel people?

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Why not both? I've met my share of idiots measuring productivity wrong, and there needs to be a chain of idiots all the way up to let this escalate to a lawsuit (chains of idiots I've also seen). But I've also seen cruelty on occasion, and you need to have no empathy with your workers to have made this call in the first place.

What was that recent Microsoft quote, something about "we believe with Copilot one developer can produce 1m lines of code per month"?

I could produce way more than 1m lines of code in far less than a month, and wouldn't even need Copilot.

I'm actually a bit terrified of the amount of code being cranked out. We worked on some code generators yesterday (not vibe-coded with AI, but yes, AI assistance was used heavily throughout) that generated thousands and thousands of lines of code. So we looked really really productive yesterday...

My sub-contracting/consulting career started 20 years ago writing code generators for SharePoint. Using the WSDL to generate DTOs and Service/Repository classes for them to power brochureware websites for a large luxury rentals firm. When we got a new customer that wanted a similar setup but they used WordPress, I then modified that generator to work off Custom Post Types. It could output to C# and to PHP.

The customer never used the tools, my bosses never used the tools, they were for me to work more efficiently.

So can I, and so can any man, but will they be useful lines?

A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out.

As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually got caught saying he had been on a trip on one of those weekends and was called up on it. He told everyone it was bulshit because he was being singled out and targeted unfairly. Then we got a sick leave policy that applied to everyone.

Unsurprisingly, this guy was also the reason we needed permission to WFH, had formal expense limits when travelling, and core working hours during the day. He ruined it for 30 other people because he took advantage of every flex we had.

He didn't ruin it for everybody. Management decided to punish the collective rather than deal with an employee who is acting in bad faith.

In a lot of places, you can't fire people unless they've violated written policy.

He did ruin it for everyone.

Management called him up on the sick days. he responds by saying that there's no policy for sick days, and to show him in the handbook where it says he has a limited number of sick days, or that he needs to notify someone. They can't, because we don't have one. When he's told this isn't acceptable, he pushes back saying that he's being singled out.

You're in America, right? At–will employment? The manager could have simply terminated that employee, citing no reason?

Nope.

That sounds like the real problem was the lack of an employee handbook. They're not strictly required by law, but 30 employees is well above the level where you should really expect to have one in place.

The "just wing it and hope no-one takes the piss" approach is fine if you've only got a handful of employees, but is increasingly risky beyond that - it was probably only a matter of time before that organisation got into a difficult HR situation one way or another.

It's not even going to have been much of a time-saving, since all the legally-mandated bits (eg. equal opportunities, grievance procedures, anti-harassment, modern slavery, and consultation process) will still have been needed at that size, just without a central place to track and manage it all.

> That sounds like the real problem was the lack of an employee handbook.

That's my point - we didn't have one because we didn't need one. 30 people is still small enough that you can be on first name terms with every single person in the company and know what everyone is doing day-to-day. Anecdotally, I'd say one in every 30 people I've worked with in my career are like this - so that's probably the point you do need one.

Poor performers get put on PIPs, right? Did that person's poor performance "ruin it for everyone" and put the rest of the working plebs (the entire company or department or whatever) on PIPs? No, of course not. The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.

So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).

EDIT: As an alternative, sure, update the handbook's sick policy while that liar is working for you. Since there's now precedent for handbook updating, should be an easy thing to revert it back to the normal, "no sick day policy" after they leave (by whatever means).

> The poor performer gets singled out, which is just fine.

he's not a poor performer, he's just an asshole. And you can't fire someone for being an asshole

> So instead of punishing everyone for some lying asshole's poor judgment, I propose management puts that lazy jerk on their own SDIP (sick day improvement plan).

You're missing the point. You can't single the person out for violating a policy that you didn't have written down. The only reason that policy is now written down is because that person violated the policy. Singling out someone for being (genuinely) ill is likely to end up with you on the wrong end of an employment tribunal who will ask you "what is your sickness policy"

In the USA, unless they have a contract, you can definitely fire someone for being an asshole.

If you have any sense whatsoever, you'll simply say "we've decided not to continue your employment" and offer them a month of paid COBRA and two weeks of pay in exchange for an agreement not to sue.

It's a demonstration of power. Which is exactly why it needs fighting against, because these people (i.e. Dyson) must not have power.

But why only demonstrate power over 12 people and not the alleged 1200+ that work there?

Tell me when Justice condemns a corrupt billionaire to piss himself.

Not actually Dyson, one of their parts suppliers.

The significance of this ruling is that a British company can be held liable for its suppliers' treatment of workers in anther country.

To add, what I wrote in parent is very brief and superficial. There is at least one comment here with more detail about when they can be liable, and why Dyson was liable in this case.

There are countries where white collar office workers are banned from having drinks, including even a bottle of water at their desks.

You'd be amazed what is legal or at least normalized/tolerated when regulations are weak.

Some people can't give without taking. They see the world purely as zero sum. They can't win without someone else losing. So, yeah, if they feel like they're "giving" to someone by paying them minimum wage they'll try to take as much as they can in return, including that person's dignity.

Coincidentally in Eastern Germany they (or so I heard) had a "keys to the toilet" trope, meaning that whoever managed to obtain any kind of position (being entrusted with controlling access to a vital facility) could and often would then go and take advantage of it by expecting bribes-in-kind from people.

people who lack imagination. Its much easier to believe that people are out to get you as opposed to facing your own failed decisions.

Employers are not always very smart. It took humanity half a millennium to realise slavery is inefficient and ditch it. Go figure.

Slavery is unfortunately still a thing in too many parts of the world.

Including the US.

And 68% of American adults don't even know it [0]. Not to mention all the foreign slavery in the supply chain, or all the slavery we've directly enabled by 'toppling dictators' who wouldn't give us their shit.

0 - https://www.merkley.senate.gov/is-slavery-still-legal-in-the...

Is that why slavery was banned?

Slavery wasn't inefficient and was highly profitable for slaveholders.

Not contradicting the second part, but I want to emphasise that they are different things. Slavery (and capitalism) can be extremely inefficient and simultaneously wildly profitable.

Surely it's meaningless to compare the efficiency of slavery vs other systems, since your set of resources is completely different.

You could if you look at e.g. the crop yield (ceteris paribus). I don't know why you would, because what sane conclusion could you draw from it?

You could compare systems to identify which one produces the greatest profit from the least costs, which the main thing an entrepreneur cares about.

Except the slaveholders entire life revolved around managing slaves and worrying about slave revolts.

No. If you actually read the history, many slaveholder delegates management works to slaves

So not much has changed really?

Yep pretty much no difference between 1800s chattle slavery, and having to work in an office.

Not as profitable for robot owners today

Try 7 or 8 millennia. The Atlantic slave trade was just a rounding error in all the slaves that have ever been.

It's low trust and they want to avoid abuse of toilet breaks so they set rules on number of breaks and duration...

In the case of James Dyson it's almost certainly pure malice. Horrible man.

It could be that they are complete psychopaths with no respect for human life, or it could be that a minority of employees abuse toilet breaks but labour protection laws make them unfireable.

Like someone mentioned already, it's a demonstration of power. But it goes well beyond that: it's about domination, discipline, constant monitoring, the reduction of individual agency, humiliation (you need permission for a basic human need) etc. The labour process theory says that that management systems are not only about coordinating work but about securing control over workers, that the drive for efficiency is also a drive for managerial control, including monopolising judgement and pacing work from above [0]

In many cases it's an intentional dehumanisation of the workers - they're seen as assets or numbers, as a type of machines that should be worked to their maximum physical and mental capacity and that are not owed any dignity [x], as if work is nothing more than mechanics. Foucault (in his "Discipline and Punish") speak about how disciplinary power produces "docile bodies" by making bodies more useful and easier to control, breaking functions and movements into optimised segments. [1] This is consistent with how the capitalist workplace normally operates, where employers want to control workers' time and actions, not just the finished product. We could see the toilet restriction just as an extreme, contemporary expression of the same thing. [2] For example, dodgy Amazon does that by making bathroom use hard and uses strict worker monitoring mainly as control/discipline thing, a sort of integrated control architecture (crazy pace + surveillance + comparison + dystopian ranking and whatnot) [3][6]

For all his faults, Heidegger's point (especially in his writing on technology) is relevant here, as he claims that modern systems tend to treat everything as a resource to be ordered, measured, and used. He says that things and people get turned into "standing-reserve" (basically stock to be managed) [4]

Many employers believe that loo breaks should happen in a workers' own time [5], which is both ridiculous and an shirking of responsibility towards society from businesses (which has always been the case).

What is certain is that this is certainly not as a serious productivity argument, despite what predatory companies like Amazon claim [z], because this kind of treatment can have (and often does, like the article shared above shows as well) severe consequences for health, dignity, and productivity. [7]

The fact that regulatory bodies like OSHA in the US, and especially in the EU, recognise the abuse pattern shows it's not just anecdote or rhetoric (like the Economist and similar papers often suggest), or that it applies to countries that aren't as developed as we like to think we are in the US and the UK, but a real issue that's rather common.

Also relevant: https://www.un.org/en/observances/toilet-day

[0] https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article/43/1/61/7684997

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

[2] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/14546...?

[3] https://cued.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2023/10/Pa...

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

[5] https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/give-us-loo...

[6] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/09/they-treat-us-worse-than-an...

[7] https://sif.org.uk/why-workplace-toilet-access-matters/

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/19/thousands-uk-w...

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