There are some strict time-keeping requirements for bathroom use when it comes to certain contracts, like government ones. It wasn't too bad, but I forget the specifics. It was like it had to be less than 5 minutes, or you use your 15 minute breaks or lunch for anything longer.
I have written many government contracts and I can tell you that there are no federal timekeeping requirements that would mandate that level of granularity.
Some contractors record a lot more detail than their contract requires. I've worked on government contracts. One workplace had a timekeeping system for DOD and a separate one for the corporate overlord. The latter was much more detailed. It was a pain to fill out multiple time cards.
It is also a response to handful of people who (rightly) want to get paid for their 3-5 minutes each clock in to open a shop. When you are negotiating 5 minutes this way, then the corporate negotiates 5 minutes that way, and pretty soon it is a legal contract. Of course the corporate should pay for the minutes to open the shop, and some would fix this on the first discussion, but others would pull in the lawyers, because hey that's our culture.
Extrapolating here ... employee wants 5 minutes of bathroom breaks because it was not in contract and the manager abused it, so when the 5 minutes gets written into the contract, then the manager can still abuse it by writing you up for a 6 minute break, or just refuse to help you out today because he did not have a good experience with you or someone else yesterday.
We are losing the human touch due to both-sided legalese in everything.
100% - At my last company we had an unlimited sick policy. Wonderful for everyone - don't even question staying home if you're remotely ill. Well, it was wonderful until one employee was sick every Friday and Monday and some. We ended up having to adjust the company policy for two weeks sick time and beyond that required a doctors note. The employee continued their pattern and once they hit their two weeks of sick time off they couldn't provide a doctors note for further time off and ended up getting let go after continuing to call in sick. The company had benefits covering if folks needed counseling, substance abuse issues, etc... which were offered to the employee but they never took advantage of it.
You didn't have an unlimited sick policy. You had an undocumented limit. Documenting it lets people know where they stand and protects them in the event they need to take sick time but the boss wants to punish them for it anyway. It also means there's one standard for everyone, rather than people being treated in a discriminatory fashion (you get three weeks, but Samantha gets one).
But isn't this how it always goes? There's an informal policy because writing up every single thing in a contract is tedious for both parties. Then someone comes up and figures "hey, free vacation, I'd be stupid not to take advantage".
So, they do take advantage for a while, until everyone realizes they're a jerk, so now everyone has to go through the new "process". Because they can't just be fired "for taking sick leave", which "is their right".
Exactly. Suddenly your imaginary worry about someone's 10 minutes of lost productivity is a class action lawsuit under accessibility legislation that will probably burn you for 1000x that cost or more and leave your reputation, ironically, in the toilet.
Or being female and unlucky with the effects of your cycle.
Or just having a rough day because something you ate was bad.
It's one thing if there's an ongoing pattern of long, unexplained breaks and someone's line manager has a discreet word about it and asks if there is anything they need to know. However routinely messing with things like breaks or availability of kitchen and bathroom facilities is surely one of the most counterproductive policies an employer could adopt. Nothing says we respect and value our people like treating them as subhuman!
Bathroom breaks would have to get extreme before management has the slightest place in bringing it up as an issue. Anyway, if someone is getting their work done, why does it matter how many breaks they take?
Sometimes people do abuse the system. Sometimes they have a real medical issue. Sometimes they're being treated badly at the office and they're just desperate to get out of that environment and don't know how to tell anyone or get help. It's not always obvious what is happening or why.
Any of these situations can mean someone isn't getting their work done. Their colleagues might be left to pick up the slack, which isn't fair on them either. Any of the people involved might start to worry or get upset about the situation, which can make things worse.
Whatever is going on it's management's responsibility to figure it out and then deal with it professionally and with appropriate discretion and sensitivity. The difficult part is figuring out what that looks like when the situation could be delicate and there might be anything from very personal medical issues to criminal behaviour involved.
They file for reasonable accommodation and the idiots who get concerned about your bathroom time have to be quietly told to stand down because you have special permission to poo.
It can get more absurd as well. There’s an unlimited about of goldbricking and bullshit that people are capable of.
Yeah I think that type of policy is mindlessly impossible by Legislative branches under the guise of eliminating "waste" no pun intended. When in reality all those policies do is eat into the mental bandwidth of government works and contractors. There are good regulations and than just dumb ones. And you might ask what law exactly is the Legislative passing but its not laws its appointees to executive positions that run larger organizations with an agenda with actually understanding the organizations mission or purpose
Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise in cost cutting b) "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" depending on whether they like the procedure or regulation in question.
Reality is often far more mundane and dysfunctional. It's frequently just speculative bike shedding and ass-covering, exactly the kind of "pointing out exploits" stuff the HN crowd loves to engage in when it comes to policy as though organizational policy was a firewall to configure.
Here's how it probably went down: Some people were hammering out the language of a contract and some bike-shedder replied to all pointing out that breaks, work stoppages, lunch, etc, etc, were all being counted but bathroom breaks weren't and that potentially created an exploit to the proposed system of cost/time/whatever tracking. No party had the balls to take responsibility and say "this is silly, we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it" bathroom breaks wound up incorporated that into their formula. So thanks to some bike-shedder trying to "contribute" and nobody's willingness to take any risk whatsoever (by going on the record brushing aside a petty concern that could come back to bite them) everyone has to track their piss breaks. And to be fair, all these people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do (!!!). And these aren't the kind of things you can roll back later because then you have to explain why you're a) deviating from established way of doing things and b) accepting some risk in doing so which nobody wants to do for a variety of reasons that have been discussed at length and are outside the scope of this comment.
Source: This crap happens like quarterly in my workplace.
Edit: of course there's other potential complications that can effect these kinds of things but you get the gist.
I can imagine somebody somewhere spent their whole days in the bathroom and management in its infinite wisdom, instead of (or in addition to) firing the dude instituted this sort of smoothbrained policy.
I had a teacher in high school who would respond the same way (more or less) whenever someone would ask to use the restroom:
> If you ever have a job that needs you to ask to use the restroom, find a better job.