Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far?

An anonymous reader writes "I work in a call center, full time, for a large mail order pharmacy. Recently, as part of their campaign to better track time spent both at and away from our desks, they have started tracking bathroom breaks. They use a Cisco phone system, and there is now a clock out option that says 'Bathroom.' My question is whether or not this is in any way acceptable in a large corporate environment (Around 800 people work at this same pharmacy) and is it even legal? How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this? Has this happened to any of you?"

Comments

Unionize

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a union. It's the only way to fix this kind of thing.

Re:Unionize

[leromarinvit]

You need a union. It's the only way to fix this kind of thing.

This. So much this. You don't have to put up with this bullshit. And it will only get worse unless you fight back.

Re:Unionize

[dmacleod808]

Until the United States passes union laws, this will just result in the entire workforce being laid off and non - union talent being hired. There are plenty of people who want a job.

Re:Unionize

[digitalchinky]

Although I agree with the sentiment, as a former vicidial / polycom consultant in all cases where I had to log toilet breaks the underlying reason was always driven by the clients, not the call agent employers. The call centers would prefer to log nothing at all, but the clients pay good money for analysis of the dialler logging. Take a look at the contracts and you'll get an idea of how detailed these agreements are. It sucks, but that's where the pay check comes from. If you push back too hard there are a hundred more centers that could be up and running with the same product in a few days.

Re:Unionize

[leromarinvit]

The idea migt be shocking to you, but there's nothing wrong with having a union even when things are going well. When labor laws are being violated, you need a union that can draw support from and build upon an established base, so it is actually able to act. Just starting to build one then seems a tad late.

Re:Unionize

[alere]

Joined just to comment on this. Used to work at a unionized call center for a major corporation, they did the exact same thing. Tracked bathroom breaks, had people coming to work while contagious and ill, wouldn't let you use PTO you earned because it was "not available that day". The only thing the union did for me before I quit was take my money. Now I am extremely happy in a non unionized job making a fair wage, infinitely better benefits, and I actually enjoy going to work (not so much getting up to go to work though :) ). I've been on both sides of the fence, and my experience with unions have been they are more worried about their bottom line than helping the people who pay them. They may be good for some people and really help them, but I have not experienced one that does.

Re:Unionize

[Pseudonym]

You unionize when labor laws are obviously being violated.

You get a lawyer when labor laws are obviously being violated. You unionise when you want to negotiate with management on behalf of the workforce as a whole, not just on behalf of yourself.

You also unionise when labor laws which don't yet exist (but should) are being violated. The law is often behind technology, so there will always be a place for this.

Re:Unionize

[Savage-Rabbit]

What a terrible first response. I mean fucking, stupidly, terrible. You don't unionize over a few bad practices, probably put in place by a stupid manager. You unionize when labor laws are obviously being violated.

There is a distinct issue here of medical privacy that is most likely being violated. Tracking bathroom visits could be a way for someone to infer you have a medical condition.

What you should do is seek an attorney who will look at this pro bono. They will probably tell you to start with your HR department with a complaint. It's all about the paper trail.

I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan. While I can see the problem when unions becoming lazy and corrupt I don't really see what is wrong with the vast majority of them who are properly run. I have been a union member all of my professional life. I prefer to have a union behind me to foot the bill if I have to take my employer to court as opposed to the situation in the US where you are frequently up shit creek without a paddle if your employer decides to crap all over you. Another service I get from my a union is legal advice regarding employment contracts. One of the many things the engineers union I am a member of offers to for it's members is to have a legal professional read over your employment contract and point out to you legal land mines your employer sometimes builds into those things like draconian clauses about IP ownership, anti competition stuff and requirements that you relinquish the right to take them to court in favour of private arbitration (no prizes for guessing who gets to choose the arbitrator). It's easy to abuse a single person, it's a whole lot harder for employers to abuse 100.000 of you standing together.

Re:Unionize

[Anonymous Coward]

Because organized labor is detrimental to the economy and a joke.

Yeah, just look at Germany. Probably the strongest unions anywhere in the world, and look where it's gotten them. The economy in the ruins, all labour outsourced to India, poor hungry people roaming the streets, right? /sarcasm

Re:Unionize

[Charliemopps]

OR... you could just find a new job.

Re:Unionize

[TapeCutter]

I worked at a place where management took the stall doors away in the toilets so they could see if people were slacking off. Union had the doors back up that afternoon and that was the last we heard of it.

Re:Unionize

[HapSlappy_2222]

The only problem is this: I worked for Qwest / CenturyLink, who DOES have a union. Guess what? Bathroom breaks were still tracked, down to the minute, just like regular breaks, lunch, arrival, and departure.

On top of this, I was forced to quit my job there when the union didn't allow me to change my schedule due to lack of seniority. I had my kids coming home for the summer, and there's not a lot of daycares that stay open until 8:00 pm; none that I could afford on my salary.

Unions are great if they really do look after the workers, but this isn't the 50s anymore. If you need any sort of special accommodations, or the union decides some egregious policies aren't really an issue (bathroom breaks, mandatory overtime, etc) then you're screwed either way.

Quit and find a new job. That's my advice; you'll be happier.

Re:Unionize

[plover]

No, the solution has to be government interference of some kind. There is no world government (thankfully), but the downside is that nobody mandates fair trade or labor practices between countries. That's up to the countries themselves.

Consider an example under way right now in the solar panel industry. Domestic solar panel makers build factories that cost $10 million dollars to produce panels that cost $5,000 each. A Chinese factory with a leftover billion dollar chip factory (they upgraded to a $10 billion dollar factory to make state of the art chips) now starts making solar panels much more efficiently and with much cheaper labor, for $1,000 per panel. Domestic makers can't compete and will soon go out of business. Chinese factory will raise prices to $10,000 per panel. Domestic consumers will then be paying twice the price of domestic solar panels for foreign imports. Everyone in the U.S. knows that if a new domestic maker tries to enter the market to sell $4,000 panels, the Chinese will lower the price to $1,000 until the domestic factory is out of business, then raise them back to $10,000.

That's monopolistic behavior, and would be illegal under the Sherman Act. Under current trade practices, it's perfectly legal for the Chinese to do it.

There is no way to compete in a global market when domestic producers have to follow domestic laws that do not apply outside our borders. And those domestic laws are there to prevent domestic companies from doing exactly the same thing, which we already agree is bad for all consumers.

The answer is punitive tariffs, (aka government interference.) We shouldn't try to balance everything out and derive a "fair price" for solar panels, and tax the Chinese solar panels until they're competitive with domestic solar panels. We should look at the behavior in this case, and say "you profited at $10,000 panels, you drove an American company out of business with $1,000 panels, the tax on all imported panels is now $10,000 and the tax on all solar panels from China is now punitively set at $20,000." If we do this in every case where industries practice dumping on us, the Chinese will get very mad at the factory owners who keep trying to screw the U.S., and will take care of the problem internally. Meanwhile, the $10,000 tax will prevent gray market panels from China making an end-run through other countries. And in the U.S., domestic companies will be free to compete with each other for our business, selling panels at fair domestic prices of $5,000 or $4,000.

We're never going to take care of our own people until we protect them.

Re:Unionize

[jenningsthecat]

I will never understand how the political and moneyed classes in the USA managed to convince the working man in that country that unions are the spawn of Satan.

It wasn't necessarily the political and moneyed classes that did it. I too see the necessity of unions, but I hope never to have to belong to one. Why? As a contractor who sometimes does work in factories and mines, I have seen first hand the greed, pettiness, laziness, and sense of entitlement that union shops often breed. When one union member files a grievance because an outside contractor is holding a nut into which another union member is turning a bolt, because 'a union employee should be doing that work', (even though there was no union employee immediately available to hold the nut), then unionism is going too far. When work is halted because a light bulb is burned out, (and we're talking about the screw-in kind, within easy reach), because changing the bulb is 'an electrician's job' and the electrician doesn't show up for an hour, the union isn't doing itself any favours. And when union employees *regularly* take 45 minutes to do an easy job that only requires 5 or 10 minutes even for an inexperienced person, then the union is shooting itself in the foot. In too many union shops, demonstrating efficiency, initiative, and overall competence is enough for an employee to be shunned, threatened, or even physically harmed, by his or her 'brothers' and 'sisters' - never mind the union grievance process.

Politically I am fairly far left of centre; I despise the power that corporations have and the abuses they commit, and I'm all for strict government regulation whose invasiveness increases with the size and power of the corporation. For that reason I am in favour of unions. But I also believe in an honest day's work for a day's pay, and I believe that I should be free to work as efficiently and intelligently as I can, without fear of union reprisals, whether official or unofficial. For that reason, I hate unions that abuse the power they have.

In many cases unions are their own worst enemies, pure and simple

Re:Unionize

[TapeCutter]

Since I am neither bad, nor lazy, I often make a considerable amount more than my coworkers. Even those who supposedly have the same title and more seniority. If I don't like the job, the environment, or my boss, I can always leave and go somewhere else.

Ditto, but I've also spent 15yrs on the other side of town where unions are often all that's between you and the gutter, doesn't matter how good you are at swinging a mop, without unions there are a hundred more who will do it cheaper.

You seem to think that unions are there to protect lazy people? - Have you have actually tried raising a family while wearing a blue color? Do you have callouses on your hands from all your "hard work"? Do realize that when people call you a "suit", it's not a sign of respect?

Re:Unionize

[nine-times]

You also unionise when labor laws which don't yet exist (but should) are being violated.

Also, you unionize to combat unfair treatment that can't be addressed very well by laws. Like maybe you don't want to make it illegal for anyone to work 60 hour weeks, but maybe in this case, with this company, given the kind of working being done and the amount being paid, 60-hour work weeks aren't really fair.

It's funny to me how you get free-market types who argue that the free-market is better because it's more flexible and able to deal with context, but then they don't think it's appropriate to complain about legal behavior. So the argument might be, "We shouldn't have laws restricting the numbers of hours that a person can work in a week, because it's too hard to measure what's fair, and not all jobs are equal, and maybe some people *want* to work 60 hours per week. If people don't like working 60 hours per week, then they won't take jobs that require it." Or whatever, something along those lines.

But then the employees get together and say, "We don't want to work 60 hours per week. We're going to unionize and renegotiate."

Then suddenly the argument becomes, "Whoa whoa! You have no right to complain to renegotiate! I'm not doing anything illegal. I should be able to exploit everyone as much as I can until I do something illegal."

Then if you suggest that you create a new law to restrict the number of hours a person can work in a week, it drops back to, "Oh, you communists! This stuff should be handled by the market. If people don't want to work 60 hours, they can just quit their jobs."

Re:Unionize

[InsectOverlord]

When I worked as a consultant for a software company I had to log every break I took, no matter how short, for billing purposes. While that sucks, it's understandable. But one didn't have to log "bathroom". One just logged "personal" and that could be a private call, coffee, bathroom, fresh air, whatever. Requiring the employee to log bathroom breaks strikes me as a totally unacceptable violation of privacy.

Re:Unionize

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm starting to suspect americans got conned once again, because your description of how your union worked sounds so far removed from how the unions I've been part of here in europe that you might as well be from another planet.

For an example, "I was forced to quit my job there when the union didn't allow me to change my schedule due to lack of seniority." would not happen here, the only instance when the union would care about your schedule would be if you logged more than the legal maximum hours of overtime. The employer would care about your schedule, but here you'd be able to use your paid for parental leave to leave work in order to pick up your kids and there wouldn't be anything they could do about it (assuming they don't just start to making shit up, but that fight is what you supposedly have unions for, so not even that option will be cheap for them).

as I said, accounts like yours makes me confused.

Re:Unionize

[bibliophage]

I've never understood the free market argument against unions. Unions are a *function* of the free market. They fit in the role of consumers (of employment) who want to have some control over the product they buy (the work they do). If the free market provided everything the employees need/want, no one would want to unionize.

Re:Unionize

[cob666]

The OSHA rules for bathroom breaks are that the employer cannot deny reasonable access to the bathroom and can't REFUSE an employee's ability to take a bathroom break unless the employees absence would put other people on jeopardy (such as requiring a certain number of people to run a piece of machinery, which would require somebody else to fill in for the employee while on bathroom break).

There are no laws that prohibit or restrict the employer from tracking bathroom breaks but the employee must be paid for all breaks less than 20 minutes. Also, from what I've read, there is nothing to prevent an employer from letting an employee go for excessive time away from their work area.

As far as 'when does time tracking go too far?' An employer should definitely be able to track when employees are NOT actually working, I don't see a problem here unless the employer is restricting bathroom usage.

Re:Unionize

[SlippyToad]

as I said, accounts like yours makes me confused.

Well, it could be that he's trolling on behalf of the anti-union folks in this country who would just as soon see us return to slave labor, and his account is bullshit meant to terrify people who know nothing about unions into avoiding them at all costs.

Re:Unionize

[TheGratefulNet]

corps have huge power.

unions are there to balance it.

balance is needed.

no one said anything about either side being a perfect entity. ideally, unions should neutralize the abuse in business and business should act well enough to its work force that union force is not needed.

if there is only 1 side, its not balanced.

time has shown, that workers without a focused voice, are ignored. do you deny that?

simply let the employers police themselves? you think that works?

unions are not perfect but they DO give at least some balance.

Re:Unionize

[ukemike]

I was about to hook up our ohm meter one time before I knew the "rules" and was told I would have a grievance filed against me.

This sort of behavior is like a histamine reaction and it does not happen in isolation. It is an overreaction to a minor insult brought on by a historically learned need to be protective of their jobs. There are many tools that management can use to attempt to undermine unions. One technique is to hire non-union employees or contractors to do the sort of work that the unionized employees typically do. Over time you can reduce the size of the union you are dealing with until they become irrelevant. In workplaces where this has been attempted the union workers will tend to get very protective of the work they are supposed to do. The arrogance of doing work intentionally slowly probably has it's roots is some other bit of adversarial relationship with the employer.

Re:Unionize

[phantomfive]

That's called dumping and there is international law against it. If the US chooses, they can bring a complaint against China to the WTO. And in fact there is one ongoing.

Re:Unionize

[jpmorgan]

Unions would be okay if they were subject to the same market forces as their employers. But they're not, they're protected by reams of labour law. Unions are allowed to monopolize labour in an industry and force anti-competitive security agreements, which would be considered anti-competitive and illegal in any other contract.

Consider the infamous 'right-to-work' states. What does being a 'right-to-work' state mean? It means unions can't compel people to join. In Germany, for example, the decision to join a union is considered an individual decision, and workers have an equal right to join or not join a union; the right to free association, means you're also free not to associate if you don't want to. But if you disagree with your union in Michigan and want to opt out, good luck making that legal argument.

Re:Unionize

[jpmorgan]

Don't worry, your union dues are well appreciated by the politicians your union supports in your name.

Re:Unionize

[ryanov]

It would not surprise me to learn that this guy got bad information. I hear sometimes people complaining to me about things the union won't let them do, aka. things that the organization told them the union wouldn't let them do. Don't believe what HR tells you about your union.

Re:Unionize

[sjames]

There is a flip-side to that and it is management-speak. For example, the maintenance guy who wouldn't change the oil in the manager's personal vehicle is 'not a team player'. The guy who filed a complaint about the rickety ladder with the broken rung is 'a disruptive influence'. The guy who actually expects to be paid for the hours he works is 'goofing off'. Because of that, the unions make it hard to fire people for those things. Unfortunately it also makes it hard to fire people who actually should be fired.

For every union where someone militantly refuses to let the assembly line run 0.01% faster than the contract states, there is a management that tried to boil the frog by slowly speeding up the line.

Re:Unionize

[sjames]

The thing though is that 'right to work' as implemented is Orwellian in meaning. It is really the right to fire for no stated reason. That reason is often enough union-like activities.

Re:Unionize

[Kalriath]

This may surprise you, but in nations that aren't the US (that haven't been brainwashed by their corporations) unions exist, run well, and exist to serve the members not themselves (and are in fact required to by law). And businesses run just fine with unions - even getting along quite well with them most of the time (contract renegotiation time notwithstanding). And you know what? The nations haven't "fallen into the cesspool known as communism" or even "[fallen into] ruin".

Stop listening to Fox News and actually do some research prior to making yourself look stupid.

Short answer

[mrsam]

Time to start sending out resumes.

Re:Short answer

[CrashandDie]

They can't. If they hit the bathroom break button, it changes their state, and they won't get any calls.

I'm the lead dev / product manager for a software VoIP callcentre solution. We've had to develop features such as "don't allow an agent to take a bathroom break if there aren't enough agents available, or the waiting queue is too big, or if the estimated waiting is over X".

Supervisors will spend the day looking at the monitor, constantly checking how many calls are waiting, how long each agent is on the line. They will put themselves in "whisper" mode, so they can yell at the agent, without the customer hearing anything. If you're ever on the line with a callcentre drone, and he suddenly starts taking time to answer, or suddenly starts having trouble finding his words, it's probably a sign you're using up too much of his allotted per-call time, and getting the poor lad into trouble.

We operate in France, so we've had to deal with a lot of employee-protection laws, but more often that not, our customers (the callcentre) will force us to override specific settings (the mandatory 2 second break after each call can be revoked if the last call was too long; hence not effective enough), even if they violate the law.

Honestly?

[dmacleod808]

Get another job. You are just being treated like cattle and there is NOTHING you can do. If you were to sue, they will find some reason to fire you. If you were to Unionize, there would be massive layoffs. In my company, I don't clock in, I don't clock out, I can work 5 hours per week overtime without approval. And I work for a fortune 300 company who you think would be soulless. I see how our CSRs are treated, and it is a damn sight better than anywhere else. And we have metrics in the upper 90% range for hold times (Less than 90 seconds) and call backs. Customer first will always make you profitable.

"Bathroom" can easily be renamed....

[overlook77]

Your company should track all "Personal Breaks" together and not specify whether it's a bathroom break or not. A personal break would be a smoke break, getting water/food, bathroom, etc. There is no reason to break it down further in my opinion. I'm a call center manager, and at our company we lump all that stuff together. At the end of the month if someone is not meeting their percent time work goals we can see how much of the problem is attributed to personal breaks vs. other things, such as off the phone research. But I personally don't want to know that someone was taking a dump for 20 min.

eat a lot....

[TenAngryPistols]

of chinese/taco bell for lunch... They did this at my first job (tech support) a few years ago. I just did everything like I always did.. if I had to drop a huge deuce and it took 10-15 minutes... then whatever. What're they gonna say? "You're fired for taking big long dumps?" Besides, with those Cisco soft phones when you "log out" and choose the available options for why you're logging out, most people will select the most generic answer like "asking a question" or "helping a customer" or whatever. You'll eventually see that people in your apartment spend a LOT of time "asking questions/helping customers" and almost nobody has to poop anymore.

Re:eat a lot....

[vlm]

You'll eventually see that people in your apartment spend a LOT of time "asking questions/helping customers" and almost nobody has to poop anymore.

And you've just discovered the REAL purpose of rolling something like this out. Anyone mgmt likes (hotties, brownnosers, relatives, etc) will ignored when they falsify records, but anyone they want to get rid of (wrong race, wrong church, wrong political party, whatever) will be fired with cause due to documented fraud resulting in no unemployment benefits because they were falsifying timesheet documents by taking a dump instead of "asking questions". I mean they'd got a timesheet showing you were "asking a question" and a avi file from the security cameras clearly showing you walk into the bathroom, it seems an open and shut case?

This also goes higher level than just employee. Now any team lead / supvr / manager can be disciplined at any time for allowing the falsification to happen ... or perhaps not disciplined ... depending on how much the boss of the lead / supvr / mgr likes the victims race, church, political party, etc.

don't overthink it

[Anonymous Coward]

You're in a call center, so when you get up today, you already have to hit something to stop receiving calls that were in queue. I would say the purpose of that button is to separate out a bit more detail on the reporting side vs, checking up on individuals. I came from a prior call-center environment, on the backend network/telephony team, and having to "check-in/out" each time you walk away from the phone/cube was normal. This was a 600 person call center, also healthcare.

Make that break permanent.

[__aaltlg1547]

If you care about your rights, working in a call center is not the right job for you. Only drones can tolerate it for long. It seems you have hit your limit, so go take a permanent bathroom break and find yourself a new job.

Take your phone to the bathroom!

[yog]

Better than unionizing -- just take your wireless headset to the toilet. You can stay on your calls, and there can be an LCD monitor in the stall if you need to reference information, read from a script, check your Facebook page, etc.

At the end of a particularly annoying call, the sound of a toilet flushing would be entirely appropriate, too!http://slashdot.org/story/12/09/16/1213226/ask-slashdot-when-does-time-tracking-at-work-go-too-far#

Manager here

[stewbacca]

I'm a manager at a call center. We track time away from calls, not because we care how long it takes you to take a smoke, or to take a crap, but for metrics. We have over 25,000 people on the phones world wide and how many minutes a call takes vs. how many workers are available for a call vs. how many workers are away from their desk (for whatever reason, we don't care) is critical to improving wait time.

As usual for the paranoia gang around here, it's not really about you. It's a big wad of data that is considered on the whole to make better business decisions.

Now back to your extended shitter break.

+1 parent please...

[jeffb (2.718)]

This is the real evil of overly draconian regulations or laws. Sure, the subjects can choose to ignore them, and the authorities can choose not to enforce them -- but the authorities can also choose to enforce them, at their own discretion, and with no apparent legal recourse for those they single out. As far as I can tell, "everybody else was doing it" is not a valid defense.

Piss on the floor

[sjames]

If they're going to treat you like a small child, act like one.