> Olivero then said in the filing that in January her manager said she was going to be written up, and that she'd need to get a doctor's note within five days.
That seems... reasonable? Two months is a decent amount of time. How long should Amazon have waited?
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.
It's inhumane, yes, but it's not Amazon-specific.
Blue collar work / retail is not like tech where your output is not necessarily a function of hours worked. In tech you can go to the bathroom 8 hours a day as long as you get your work done. Can you say the same for a warehouse worker?
There isn't enough righteous indignation about this on HN. Thank you. (No sarcasm, there really isn't enough - we need to care more about people's lives.)
Also famous anecdote of Terry Guo: during breaks between meetings, top level executives including Guo might go to the toilets. If you were one of the executive and happen to pick a urinal right next to Guo, he would peek if your urine looked healthy. If it looks healthy, that means he can and will put more workload on you.
Similarly, if you were attending a public institution, it makes sense that if you're seeking special accommodation then you'd at least have to disclose how you want to be accommodated. It does not mean you have to disclose you have IBS.
What we might debate is whether 2 months is a reasonable timeframe to ask for a doctor to write a note, or whether 6 bathroom trips a day should be the threshold that a warehouse should care about.
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.
You don’t need a full diagnoses for that.
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.
and the response seems eminently reasonable. getting a note in 2 months is just not a draconian requirement no matter how it is spun. i have to give benefit of the doubt and assume accommodations could have been made if one had been produced. I'm sorry but this is the reality if you work a menial job where you are easily replaced. I feel like people are just being blinded by seeing "Amazon" in the headline; the alternative is an unbelievable level of naivete
Not to say these policies are grand or the working conditions are anywhere near reasonable just that the claim from the lawsuit it was a disability violation seems like it will be difficult to argue vs just being a shitty place to work.
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.
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.
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. Manage a large enough number of people and you will inevitably come across such types on rare occasion.
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?
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.
https://coreyrobin.com/2012/03/08/lavatory-and-liberty-the-s...
I assume that each poop has a time limit as well?
The law firm I worked for lost the notes from my doctor and fired me.
Law firm has amazing lawyers and I was afraid of being blackballed.