Spending a penny costs a packet

posted at 15:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

I just read an article on the BBC website which caught my eye - which isn't suprising as it's headlined "Row over firm's toilet break rule".

The issue us that workers aren't being paid to use the toilet, they have to clock on and off when they want to have a comfort break:

...The employee, who asked not to be named, told the BBC that a single toilet break could take up to 10 minutes.

"We have to clock out, take off our wellies, overalls and hairnets, we have to run up stairs, have to come back in get dressed again," she said.

The factory manufactures (or packages, the article isn't that clear) food for a major UK supermarket chain so I can understand that it's awkward trying to preserve health and hygene regulations (hence the 10 minute loo break I guess!) but just because it takes that long (which it has to if all legal obligaitons are to be observed) doesn't mean that the staff should be penalised surely?

If you think about it, say you went an average of 3 times a day (and remember my maths is really bad so I'm probably going to work this out all wrong):

Average number of working days per year: 260 (I read that figure somewhere!)
Number of bog breaks a year: 780 (260 x 3)
Time spent going to the toilet: 7800 minutes or 130 hours
Minimum wage: £5.73/hour (October 2008 rates I think)
Total lost by employee: £744.90

I can understand that the company will argue that the shouldn't pay for any time not worked, but when you look at the breakdown above, it's surprising that the workers haven't risen up in mutiny against these archaic working conditions, £744 to a person on minimum wage is a huge amount of money to lose just because nature calls.

If it were me, I'd be looking for another job.