7 ms·
Court: Employers Must Allow Workers to Sit If They Prefer While on the Job
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tartuffe78 11y agoI thought this was gonna be about some manager at a tech company forcing everyone to use standing desks.
- yardie 11y agoI had the same thought. What sort of maniacal startup requires their employees to use standing desks?!
- anexprogrammer 11y agoWhy on earth would they want a bank teller to stand? I've never seen a bank which didn't provide everyone with seating.
- dominotw 11y ago>Why on earth would they want a bank teller to stand? Because the client is standing.
- rhinoceraptor 11y agoSo you buy a couple high stools?
- cmdrfred 11y agoOr a little cubicle and a desk like the managers have. This way both the customer and the employee can both sit. The guy next to me in line doesn't need to know I just put $1000 in my pocket.
- supremeanger 11y agoThey have those, it is called executive banking.
- JoshGlazebrook 11y agoHere's a weird observation. I recently moved from the Seattle to Austin. In Washington State, every single bank I went to it was open air between the teller and the customer. Here in Austin, the credit union I use has a physical non-transparent wall and you can only see the teller through a video screen and microphone.
- koenigdavidmj 11y agoHow much stabbier is Austin than Seattle?
- 6stringmerc 11y agoIf they're in the rapidly gentrifying area(s) on the East, which have traditionally been rife with poverty and petty crime (they were 10 years ago when I was there and before real estate is what it is now), then I'd answer "A lot more, a lot more stabbier."
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI've lived in Dallas, Austin and New York, and I've never seen that. Where do you do your banking?
- lost_my_pwd 11y agoAre you sure the teller is really on the other side of that wall? At my CU there is a teller there 24/7, it's just that after hours it is via video terminal integrated with the ATM piped to some remote office.
- chrismcb 11y agoThere are plenty of banks in Washington that have thick bullet proof glass. And not just in downtown Seattle
- greggman 11y agoUse a bank that doesn't have tellers? You don't stand at First Republic Bank. The bankers have desks. You sit down with them for any transaction you need personal help with. Sorry if that sounds like an ad for my bank but so far, 9 years, I'm a happy customer
- pavel_lishin 11y agoTo be honest, that sounds annoying. I just need to hand the teller some papers, and have them give me back a receipt. I don't want to sit down and bond and feel respected; I want to go into a building and come out having accomplished my task, preferably in under five minutes.
- greggman 11y agoI've been served faster at first republic than I ever have at a bank with tellers. It's possible I've just been lucky but I've never had to wait, something that can't be said for my experience and banks with tellers.
- tremon 11y agoWhat client would choose a bank that won't even provide them a chair?
- mikeash 11y agoIn the banks I've been to, the tellers are for quick in-and-out tasks like depositing or withdrawing money, and I'd no more expect to sit down for that than I would expect to sit down when ordering a cup of coffee or purchasing groceries. For longer tasks, like opening/closing/adjusting accounts, they have bankers with desks and chairs for all. That said, I certainly would have no problem if the teller was sitting, even though I wouldn't expect to sit myself.
- vacri 11y agoDo Americans really expect that a teller should have to stand all day because each individual client is only momentarily standing during the course of their transaction? It seems the most inane argument (or have I just fallen victim to Poe's Law?)
- stuaxo 11y agoThey denied people working as cashiers a seat? This is barbarism !
- Broken_Hippo 11y agoI honestly don't know if that is sarcasm or not.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ivanca 11y agoLooking at his comment history he is not the sarcastic type, and honestly standing for 8 hours every day do sound like torture, at least for me.
- Broken_Hippo 11y agoI didn't think about looking at comment history as I rarely do so.
- mikeash 11y agoWhy would it be sarcasm? Requiring someone to stand at work, when nothing about what they do requires it, and they prefer to sit, is pretty ridiculous.
- Broken_Hippo 11y agoI probably know some horrible people, actually, that would use sarcasm. My apologies, and thank you for clearing it up. I do agree, completely, it is torturous. I've done it many times, and only at a school was I ever allowed to sit without getting written up. Weirdly, the employees comfort was rarely an issue.
- mikeash 11y agoYou raise a good point, there's no view so outrageous that you can't find someone who wants to make it seriously.
- kirykl 11y agoGeorge Costanza would be proud
- ryanmarsh 11y agoHow about stand if they prefer? Big problem in office environments. Bad for the back to sit.
- cmsmith 11y agoReminds me of a couple paragraphs in this [1] story: >Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?" >One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day. It's easy to denounce things like this as a burden on employers. But I think it's certainly better for society than having a bunch of people not working because in order to work, you need to either have a college degree or be willing to stand for 8 hours straight every day. [1] http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
- pc86 11y agoI don't think anything can make a straight-faced argument that having to provide cashiers or tellers with a chair is a "burden." You can literally find a metal folding chair on the side of the road and buy a $1 pillow from a dollar store or Goodwill.
- mlrtime 11y agoit starts at a $1 chair and ends when lawsuits demand $1000 Herman Miller chairs.
- jessriedel 11y agoI know mlrtime's comment probably isn't conducive to a good discussion, but it's worth noting that his example isn't that crazy. There are lots of extremely expensive adjustable desks for folks who want to stand up while they work, and most are bought by government agencies or large lumbering firms. http://store.focalupright.com/sphere-standing-desk-p/let-1000.htm http://store.focalupright.com/sphere-standing-desk-p/let-100... http://www.thehumansolution.com/uplift-950-electric-sit-stand-l-shaped-solid-wood-desk.html http://www.thehumansolution.com/uplift-950-electric-sit-stan... http://www.ergodepot.com/Focal_Locus_p/focal-locus.htm http://www.ergodepot.com/Focal_Locus_p/focal-locus.htm It's not that courts mandate super expensive desks per se, but their mandate interacts with several other institutional disfunctions and, in real life, leads to mid- and lower-level employees buying $10k desks on someone else's dime.
- cmdrfred 11y agoI worked as a cook for about ten years before I got into tech, my back still hurts to the point that I have trouble getting out of bed about 5 - 10 times a year from 50+ hours of standing/running around on tile floors. I'm 27. If employers don't want to provide chairs then they should be on the hook for medical costs (and none of this "pay a lawyer and sue us and maybe in 3 years you'll get a partial payment provided we didn't go bankrupt" nonsense). The new American trend appears to be that business should never have to pay any of the externalities they cause and it seems to be a model that both the left and right agree with lately.
- 33W 11y agoSent this to my scrum master, hopefully he finds it funny. Or takes it really really seriously.
- takno 11y agoWeird that the headline and most of the story are completely at odds with the court decision they describe. Literally all the court seems to have said is that you have to make a decision about providing seats at cash desks on the basis of the task of working at the cash desk, and not based on the complete set of tasks the worker might have to do across the day. The employers are still free to argue that cashier will do better cashiering while standing up.
- zeveb 11y agoWhy is this an issue for courts to decide? It should be between employees and employers, period.