Fired for urinating in a box, factory worker gets job back but sues company

Rights fight ... Disputes over bathroom breaks have prompted law suits and complaints and are even the subject of a 1998 book. 

 

A WOMAN who was fired for urinating in a box at work has had her job reinstated but she is suing the company.

Lily Prince was working on an Electrolux assembly line, making steel liners for freezers, in St Cloud, Minnesota, when the incident occurred, the Star Tribune reports.

Ms Prince, 51, says she begged her supervisor to allow her to go to the bathroom but he denied permission. She says she asked several more times over the following 30 or 40 minutes.
Eventually, she says, she lined a cardboard box with a plastic bag and urinated into the box.
“I knew I couldn’t hold it any longer,” she said. “I would have wet my pants and I would never live it down.”

The next day she was fired by Electrolux Home Products for a “health and safety violation”. She out of work for 11 months before the August 2012 dismissal was reversed by an arbitrator, who said it violated the union contract and ordered her reinstated.

Ms Prince then stepped things up.
In a suit filed by Ms Prince last year over her firing, US District Judge Donovan Frank denied a motion by Electrolux to dismiss the case, saying Ms Prince’s allegations “are sufficient to allege that she was discharged or discriminated against because she exercised her rights.”

Minnesota state law says “an employer must allow each employee adequate time from work within each four consecutive hours of work to use the nearest convenient restroom” and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration also states employees have a right to bathroom use.
Disputes over bathroom breaks have prompted other law suits and complaints and inspired the 1998 book, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time.

As recently as Friday, a US federal lawsuit was brought by a hospital employee Chia Tasah, who claims he had to use the bathroom frequently after he began taking diabetes medications in 2012, but was admonished by a supervisor who told him he could only go during break times. He was fired in June 2013 “in retaliation for seeking reasonable accommodation of his disability,” according to his lawyers.

In 2008, a huge class action against Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club let to a US$54.25 million ($60.73 million) settlement, after Dakota County Judge Robert King found that from 1998 to 2004, there were 1.5 million missed and shorted rest breaks. He mentioned the case of Nancy Braun, a Wal-Mart employee, who suffered “the humiliating experience of soiling herself while at work because she was not permitted to use the restroom.”

Ms Prince says past surgeries have left her with smaller than normal small and large intestines, requiring her to use the bathroom more frequently. The company said she never supplied medical documentation.

Prince now works a shift without restrictions about when she has to go to the bathroom. “It’s comfortable to be in a situation where I know I can go to the bathroom,” she said.