"Most of us"? Really? I absolutely acknowledge that some jobs do this as other commenters have noted. But "most" sounds like an extreme stretch. I've he;d plenty of low-paying, manual labor jobs and never even heard of the practice until the last few years. It's the overwhelming norm at schools and - as far as I've seen - fairly exceptional at a job.

It's not so much the low-payingness as much as the corporate-behemothness.

People that work at Walmart, Amazon, major grocery store chains, etc. (i.e. the major employers in America) are expected to man their post until it's time for their legally mandated scheduled bathroom break.

I suspect most people did have a job like that once in their lives. Then again, the last time I actually had a job like that I was actually still in high school, so that sort of policy didn't seem too strange to me at the time.

You think you can just take a bathroom break every time you like when you're working retail? Most people I know have worked a retail job or service industry job where they have assigned break periods, and bathroom usage outside of those would be impossible, or very frowned upon.

I guess some people in this industry had parents with enough money to avoid ever having to do a non-tech industry job? That would surprise me.

Some manual or skilled labour jobs would permit random breaks, I guess. But most people I know worked service industry. You don't get to just leave a cash register unattended because your bladder says to.

My original comment certainly didn't have much nuance in it, but I would certainly draw a distinction between a reasonable need to schedule bathroom breaks around job duties and the need to raise one's hand and ask someone's permission, which they can arbitrarily deny.

I worked various crummy retail jobs for 4 years.

In my experience, the problem of needing to go to the bathroom while also needing to man a register was overcome by a quick "yo, could you cover me for a sec?" to a coworker.

You're right. giant companies like amazon don't make you ask permission to use the bathroom. they just fire you for not performing at a pace where you fail if you use the bathroom, so then people start peeing in water bottles.

https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...