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> According to the filing, when she told a manager in November about her IBS and that she needed to use the bathroom up to six times a day, the manager told her

• CodeWriter23 5y ago
  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.
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    Someone with diagnosed IBS could get a note in an email exchange with their primary physician.
    • CodeWriter23 5y ago
      Sure, if pre-employment, one had the privilege of having a primary physician.
      • crooked-v 5y ago
        As someone with a pretty good job in software, I don't have a primary physician, because what's "in network" changes every time I switch companies.
        • mslate 5y ago
          USA, USA, USA!
        • mypalmike 5y ago
          Indeed, this is one of the reasons I chose to pass on a full time offer recently and negotiated to work under contract instead. I get to keep the same healthcare provider.
      • prepend 5y ago
        A diagnosis of IBS requires a physician, right? It’s surprising that a letter wasn’t obtained on diagnosis in the first place. Any time my doctor says something affects my work, I ask her for a letter in my medical record and keep a copy for myself. This seems pretty straightforward and odd that a letter didn’t exist in the first place.
    • mypalmike 5y ago
      Oh they had a primary physician?
      • missedthecue 5y ago
        Someone diagnosed them with IBS
        • CodeWriter23 5y ago
          Does not require a physician to diagnose. Diagnosis is based on casual observation and the cause as yet is unknown.
  • mullingitover 5y ago
    A one-hour trip to urgent care, or even an email or phone call to the doctor's office likely would've handled this.
    • geofft 5y ago
      Going to urgent care to get a routine doctor's note for a non-urgent situation wouldn't be covered by insurance, would it?
      • mullingitover 5y ago
        If you've been suffering acute IBS for months and can't get a regular doctor's appointment in that time, why would that not be considered a case for urgent care? This whole store lacks enough detail to know exactly what's going on, however, so we're all going to project our biases on it. If you're anti-Amazon you're going to project your assumptions of unfair business practices. If you're skeptical of that position you're going to project your skepticism into the unknowns of the story. Really there aren't enough facts here to know if this is Amazon firing an underperforming employee who is lying about a health condition, or failing to accommodate an employee with a legitimate health problem.
      • maxk42 5y ago
        Walk-in clinics are affordable and frequently faster than urgent care.
        • mypalmike 5y ago
          I thought walk in clinics were exactly urgent care.
        • Igelau 5y ago
          Where are these quick, affordable, walk-in GI specialist clinics you speak of?
        • klyrs 5y ago
          IBS is a diagnosis of last resort. You don't get that from a walk-in clinic, you get that from a months- or years-long quest to eliminate every possible cause, before your doctor throws up their hands and calls it IBS.
  • zamadatix 5y ago
    I think the 2 weeks sick time and unlimited unpaid sick time off were still in effect, not to mention a full day off probably isn't required. 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.
    • CodeWriter23 5y ago
      My current job, I started with 0 hrs sick time and accumulate 1.67hrs per pay period (2x/mo). I’m fortunate that I work in a cool place and they would have fronted me the day off if I needed it.
• kradeelav 5y ago
  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.
  • bllguo 5y ago
    to me 6 times during working hours is frequent by any measure, but that's hardly the important thing here. there has to be a line somewhere. is 8 frequent? 10? there is some threshold X, what we care about most is the response to crossing it 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
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
      In theory you should be using the bathroom every 2 hours if you are drinking the right amount of water. That is 4 times in 8 hours, so 6 is not a lot
      • prepend 5y ago
        No, this is not correct. I drink a gallon of water each day and go 3-4 times. Also, this isn’t for pee breaks as the employee referenced a bowel issue.
        • mrmuagi 5y ago
          I think it varies, yes. People have smaller bladders, some have larger. It also depends on how reactive you are to the sensation of a full bladder, and how risk averse you are to having it full -- perhaps you have had bladder issues, infections, etc. in the past and are mandating a self policy of frequent urination. But it's just a reference range, and if you ever took a blood test, you realize they might not matter some times. I feel like bowel issues are worse though, since you delinated them. You never ate something that went down wrong? The worst experience I ever had was eating shrimp that caused food poisioning. I practically lived on the toilet, and I think my understanding of what IBS from having a family member who has is gives me a perspective that only offers sympathy rather than criticism unlike other posters. I don't blame people from being doubtful that perhaps the lady in questions self diagnosed as IBS and didn't get a doctors note because it was balogne, but the invasion of medical privacy and heavy handed get-the-note or be-fired dialoge tree the manager has seems fucking bonkers. I suspect it's just an excuse to fire a system designated target -- as amazon does and they just quipped up a reason to fire her.
• Touche 5y ago
  They should not require doctors notes for using the bathroom. Be a human.
  • fridif 5y ago
    Literally this. Just more vindictive management at Amazon.
    • mypalmike 5y ago
      *vindictive management at most hourly employers
• geofft 5y ago
  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.
  • kcdev 5y ago
    You're forgetting this is a warehouse employee where productivity is tracked and ranked against other employees. Amazon cannot write up one employee and not another without something like a dr. note to justify the different treatment.
    • bb88 5y ago
      In other words, they're being stack ranked, right?
    • geofft 5y ago
      I think you misread my comment. I'm specifically not advocating for different treatment. I'm saying any employee who wants to use the bathroom six times a day should be permitted to do so, IBS or no IBS. If you want to enjoy the ambiance of the bathroom six times a day, that's fine. So, Amazon can easily write up neither employee, which means they don't need anything to justify the different treatment. (Also, no, Amazon can write up one employee and another just fine. They're an independent company in a free country. They don't answer to Lord Business who tells them they have to run their business a certain way. They can do whatever they like, provided they don't run afoul of a few laws like Title VII or the ADA. And all that will happen if they do run afoul of those laws is they'll get sued - which is exactly what happened under their current policies, so....)
• mrmuagi 5y ago
  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.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    60%+ of Americans work in retail once in their lives, where bathroom breaks are almost always monitored. The people working at Walmart, grocery stores, department stores, etc. are absolutely expected to man their shift until their scheduled break, as are many people that work in restaurants, on manufacturing floors, etc. It's inhumane, yes, but it's not Amazon-specific.
    • inter_netuser 5y ago
      Not even just retail. Call centers are like that too.
  • b9a2cab5 5y ago
    It sounds like you've never worked with people who intentionally "use the bathroom" to not work. If you step out of your white collar tech bubble for a moment you'd realize giving _two months_ to give a doctor's note before reprimanding this woman is perfectly reasonable. 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?
• AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  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.
  • awsthro00945 5y ago
    I don't know exactly what Amazon asked for in this case, but any time for me in the past at either school, work, or otherwise, when "doctor's note" is mentioned, they aren't asking for a definitive diagnosis. In fact, I've never even seen a doctor's note that specifically said "[name] has influenza/rhinovirus/UTI". It's always been sufficient for the note to just say something like "I am a doctor and [name] was seen by me for digestive tract issues, please accommodate them." I can't imagine that wouldn't have sufficed here, too.
    • behringer 5y ago
      It absolutely wouldn't. Amazon's next step would be to tell her whatever note she brought isn't good enough and to get on fmla.
      • deleted 5y ago
• R0b0t1 5y ago
  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.
• hkt 5y ago
  I'm from the UK, can someone explain the timescales, cost and process of getting a doctor's note in the US?