Optional or required? That’s the argument between a communication company and a union regarding urine bags given to workers in the field.
A friend of HRB once took a new, prestigious job that was 60 miles from his home. He had to travel by car each day. The trip included one highway notorious for backups that would not infrequently slow the pace of traffic to under a mile an hour with no escape available to motorists.
Our friend’s mother was thrilled for her son. Before his first day on the new job, she presented him with an empty, plastic juice bottle and told him to put it in his car.
“What’s his for?” her son asked.
“In case you have to ‘go,’” mom said. (His mom was practical that way.)
Along those same lines, Qwest, a telephone and Internet company, distributed disposable urine bags to field technicians.
Now, a Communications Workers of America (CWA) union representative claims a supervisor told the workers they had to use the bags instead of driving back to an office to use a restroom because returning to the office wasted too much time.
“It takes the freakin’ cake,” said Reed Roberts, CWA district administrative director told the Rocky Mountain News.
A Qwest spokeswoman denied that workers are required to use the bags. “They are there for convenience, and they are there because employees asked for them,” she said.
The union hasn’t yet filed a formal grievance. No word on whether the two sides have come to an understanding.
The bag’s manufacturer says it sells them to various industrial companies, including utilities, municipal public works and telephone companies.
And perhaps the best recommendation of all for the bags: The Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered 2.5 million of them after Hurricane Katrina.
