Amazon Staffer Says She Was Fired over Bathroom Breaks for Bowel Issue (opens in new tab)

The scenario becomes weird when you take a step back and realize that she is a human being and bodily functions are even being monitored in such a way. I go to the bathroom sometimes more than her and the reasons are extremely defensible even outside medical reasons. Drink water often and see (although I would say perhaps with electrolytes mixed in as not to flush them out). I would not even doubt this was an excuse and they just wanted to get rid of her. It just feels icky, why does your manager need proof of your medical issue? What if it's a more private issue and you really don't want your medical privacy to be known to your manager? Perhaps a sexual organ is involved, and you are just not comfortable being pried into that way. Yuck.

I want to honestly ask you, how would you feel if someone monitored how many times you got up to stretch, how often you went to the bathroom, chatted with a coworker, or even just paused in thought and stopped touching your keyboard/mouse. Like a fucking human with diginity does. Would that not feel weird in your perspective? I certainly get vibes that this type of managerial practice is draconian and dehumanizing, and although my information about her day to day is limited, from the article, it seemed like an excuse to power trip and fire without justified cause.

Speaking as someone with IBS, it took a long time to get a definitive "IBS" diagnosis from my doctor. IBS is a process of elimination diagnosis. They'll confirm it's not any number of other things, and only after definitively ruling out Crohn's disease and other more serious conditions will they settle on IBS (which I took from my doctor to mean "We don't know.")

Now for treatment purposes, they were giving me medications for it long before, when they just suspected it. So that fundamentally didn't change. But the whole process of ruling everything else out first took a number of specialist visits over a number of months, including a colonoscopy. I'm wondering if that had any factor into this person's lack of a doctor's note: that her GP could only say "I suspect she has IBS, but she'd need to go to a gastroenterologist to confirm" and the patient never got around to doing the specialist visits due to the time off they require.

IIRC the meds they give you for both IBS and Crohn's are pretty much the same. The crappy thing about them (pardon the pun) is that you're really not supposed to take them preventatively: ideally you should take only as needed when symptoms occur. By the time you realize you're having one of those days, you've already had like three or four bowel movements in the span of a few hours, and you'll probably have several more before the meds start to work.

Not requiring a doctor's note for going to the restroom infrequently seems a bit more on the reasonable end.

I'd have more sympathy for Amazon if, say, she was AWOL from work for more than an hour a day with no explanation. Humans are not machines and deserve some flexibility with their time.

They should not require doctors notes for using the bathroom. Be a human.

I doubt in 60 days one can accumulate 1 day of sick time to use to go to the doctor. An unexcused absence during the probationary period would likely result in immediate termination.

From random reading on the DOL website I am pretty sure she should not have been fired. However, some of her pay could have been withheld (possibly contingent on her being classified as hourly or piecewise paid). The previously tested scenario was dialysis.

So as I understand it, if you have e.g. end stage kidney disease, you don't need to inform your employer of the fact you must be gone two times a week for three hours, and they can not fire you when they find out. But they also don't have to pay you.

However the rules about salaried positions seem to imply they can't reduce your salary.

I'm from the UK, can someone explain the timescales, cost and process of getting a doctor's note in the US?

Why require a doctor's note at all?

Humans need to go to the bathroom sometimes, and six times in a workday is, while higher than average, not terribly so. If your business processes cannot deal with humans who need to use the bathroom, that's the fault of the business process, not of the humans. It's like me running code on a cloud instance and then asking Amazon for a hardware tech's note when it reboots for hardware issues. My job, as an SRE, is to design computer systems in a way where it's okay if computers crash every so often, and if I can't do that, that's me failing at my job. Their job, as a supervisor, is to design human systems in a way where it's okay if humans go to the bathroom every so often.

Note that I'm not saying that you need to allow employees to sit in the bathroom for eight hours straight and then clock out. By all means, require that they get their work done! Just measure them on work done.

What is the doctor's note even supposed to prove? Suppose that the employee is lying about IBS and just likes the ambiance of bathrooms. Weird, sure, but does that affect your business processes? Again, measure them on work done.

If you're worried the employee is going to the bathroom to get high, or to hook up with coworkers in violation of ethics policies, or to leak trade secrets, or whatever, then go after that.

As someone who’s dealt with this exact situation, someone with a “bowel issue” likely doesn’t take 5 minute poops unless they have diarrhea. 20 minutes is about normal when you’re constipated but have to poop 5 times a day. If you don’t go to the bathroom you’re in pain and unfocused until you poop and until you’re done pooping. What’s spent in those 20 minutes? Dreading people will say exactly what you just said while dealing with your very real but very embarrassing chronic illness. Can’t hold a job down but can’t qualify for disability. Luckily I’ve made strides in my health that I don’t live that hell anymore but not everyone is that lucky.

> While most people who have chronic conditions are absolutely willing and able to perform up to task if given a reasonable accommodation, in some cases it's staggeringly apparent that the employee has no intention of ever putting in a full day's work, and is using the claim of an illness as a shield while they coast through the day.

So what? Reasonable accommodation has to include things like this, or the flexibility for the employee to work an extra hour and finish up their duties for the time they missed.

Otherwise, it's not accommodation at all.

And the idea that they're "coasting" when they're working 75% of the time is absolutely ludicrous. Does that mean French workers are all coasting, because they have a 7-hour work day?

When I worked at one of these warehouses, anything over 30 minutes per day of 'time off task' out of a 10 hour shift was supposed to get you written up. Time off task being defined as any period greater than 5 minutes without doing work that the computer tracked.

Yeah sometimes I even take long lunches. With my supervisor. No repercussions. Ha ha.

There are so many salaried employees in this thread who don't seem to realize how vastly different it is to be treated like a misbehaving child (aka hourly employee) at work.

Since this was related to IBS there's a good chance her breaks took significantly longer than your typical piss break.

Did you get a lawyer? That’s an easy settlement.

An amusing pattern is emerging with the comments in this post. People are getting downvoted for pointing taking the worker's side (pointing out you can't simply walk into a clinic to get a ibs note for instance), and people are getting upvoted for taking amazon's side.