I hate this sort of "there are other people worse off" dismissal when workers stand up for themselves. Change has to start somewhere, and other people being worse off is never a reason to not demand better conditions.

The thing about the public service is that everyone is an employee. Even the top boss is. It's the last place where change will come from. With their unsackability and final salary linked pension schemes they are completely out of touch with a country where zero hours contracts have become normal while at the same time its the taxes of those people who prop up their generally unproductive jobs.

How is that a rebuttal?

So you’re saying we should feel good when UPS workers shit themselves and pee in bottles?

Some guys in the military do it when on deployment, but that is usually because they are too lazy to walk the 50ft at night to the bathroom outside. Source: I was in the US military.

They don't really do that, you know. It happens about as often as it does in other jobs, ie rarely.

Are you saying that people in other fields, or office jobs, need to piss and shit themselves because they don't have the time to walk to the restroom located a few doors down the hallway?

Because we have at least 2 reports of it happening to UPS employees on this (currently very short) thread. Extrapolating the UPS rate of self-soiling to the entire economy, there should be literally thousands of people just pissing and shitting themselves at work every day.

But there aren't. Because most people work in jobs that let them take restroom breaks frequently enough that they don't need to soil themselves, and have access to a restroom during those breaks so that they can actually do so. UPS drivers don't: they may not have access to restroom facilities when they actually need to use them.

>They don't really do that, you know.

I doubt there will ever be an official metric, so it's your word against theirs.

I, for one, find the narrative that "they're just making it up so they can extort their employer for more money" to be less believable than than simply considering that it's the truth.

Furthermore, it was pointed out earlier in this thread that employees discuss engaging in this behavior _amongst themselves_. If it is, in fact, completely untrue, you would have to add "widespread conspiracy" to your acceptable narrative. (My reasoning being that there's far less incentive to lie to a co-worker than to a boss; only the boss can affect change. The notion that 260k low level employees have banded together to promote a lie, including amongst themselves, is so unlikely I'd call it laughable.)

I'm not saying that they are making it up but if it maybe happened once it's going to get put out there as the norm. I worked in a job once where the supervisors had their lair in a room just behind my back. They spent half their time moaning, as they sat around drinking tea all day. "Our conditions are worse than the cleaners!" was a memorable quote that's stuck in my head. Edit to add: they were govt employed, we weren't.

>maybe happened once [and] it's going to get put out there as the norm.

According to employees, it happens frequently.

I extend my arguemets about whether or not the behavior occurred (at all) to the frequency of the behavior: either it's a lie or it's not.

Once again, seems to me like it's not.

what would give those reports a lot more weight in my eyes would be if they were from ex-employees of the USPS. People who'd left the job for something else through being forced to pee in a bottle. It's ridiculous, where do taxi drivers pee? Where do ice cream sellers and sandwich board wearers and a whole host of other employees?

Ever see those liquid filled milk jugs along the side of the road when public restrooms are scarce. Maybe there's a bad milk conspiracy nobody knows about?

"It's a story designed to engender sympathy from a public most of whom in reality have inferior pay and conditions to the strikers."

That sounds like the public needs to take that up with their employers.

The story since the recovery has been one of increased output but no growth in wages. Something different is going on whereby workers don't seem to be able to bargain for more. Whether that's due to globalisation or being replaced by robots it's undoubtedly the case in the UK that society is becoming less equal. About the only group who are protected from this are those in Government jobs. Everyone else is doing less well apart from those at the very top end of society who seem to be doing better than ever.

Like I said, that sounds like something the workers need to take up with their employers. The solution in this case is never to try to tear other workers down and to attack them for having something, it's always to ask your own employer why you don't have it.

I am not attacking public server workers as a way of promoting better wages for private sector workers. Also getting a raise is not ALWAYS as simple as asking your boss for one, especially in an era of globalisation and robotics. They even have a word for the phenomenon, redundancy. All that's keeping you from the dole queue may be the fact that in real terms, you're costing less year on year because your wages are remaining stagnant.