Boston Globe, 9/29/2002 Lavatory and Liberty The secret history of the bathroom break
By Corey Robin IN HIS NEVER-ENDING quest for control of the workplace, Henry Ford confronted many foes, but none as wily or rebellious as the human digestive tract. Hoping to tame what he called the body's ''disassembly line,'' Ford wheeled lunch wagons into his auto plant in Highland Park, Mich., and forced workers to wolf down a 10-minute sandwich on the job. So industrialized was ingestion at the plant that workers growled about their ''Ford stomach.'' But where Ford sought to speed up the meal's entrance into the body, his successors - from store managers in the Midwest to fashion moguls in New York - have concentrated on slowing down its exit. Today's workplace can sometimes seem like a battlefield of the bladder. On the one side are workers who wanna go when they gotta go; on the other are employers who want to stop them, sometimes for hours on end. Just this past month, a Jim Beam bourbon distillery in Clermont, Ky., was forced to drop its strict bathroom-break policies after the plant's union focused negative international attention - from ABC News to Australia - on Jim Beam and its parent company, Fortune Brands, Inc. According to union officials, managers kept computer spreadsheets monitoring employee use of the bathroom, and 45 employees were disciplined for heeding nature's call outside company-approved breaks. Female workers were even told to report the beginning of their menstrual cycles to the human resources department, said one union leader. In their 1998 book ''Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time,'' Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard of the University of Iowa - he's a law professor, she's a urogynecologist - trace the long and ignoble history of the struggle for the right to pee on the job. In 1995, for instance, female employees at a Nabisco plant in Oxnard, Calif., maker of A-1 steak sauce and the world's supplier of Grey Poupon mustard, complained in a lawsuit that line supervisors had consistently prevented them from going to the bathroom. Instructed to urinate into their clothes or face three days' suspension for unauthorized expeditions to the toilet, the workers opted for adult diapers. But incontinence pads were expensive, so many employees downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper, which pose severe health risks when soaked in urine. Indeed, several workers eventually contracted bladder and urinary tract infections. Hearing of their plight, conservative commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. advised the workers to wear special diapers used by horses in New York's Central Park carriage trade. How does a country that celebrates the joy of unfettered movement tolerate such restrictions on this most basic of bodily motions? Why do the freedoms that we take for granted outside the workplace suddenly disappear when we enter it? ''Belated Feudalism,'' a study by UCLA political scientist Karen Orren, suggests a surprising, and shocking, answer. According to Orren, long after the Bill of Rights was ratified and slavery abolished - well into the 20th century, in fact - the American workplace remained a feudal institution. Not metaphorically, but legally. Workers were governed by statutes originating in the common law of medieval England, with precedents extending as far back as the year 500. Like their counterparts in feudal Britain, judges exclusively administered these statutes, treating workers as the literal property of their employers. Not until 1937, when the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act, giving workers the right to organize unions, did the judiciary relinquish political control over the workplace to Congress. Prior to the '30s, Orren shows, American judges regularly applied the ''law of master and servant'' to quell the worker's independent will. According to one jurist, that law recognized only ''the superiority and power'' of the master, and the ''duty, subjection, and, as it were, allegiance'' of the worker. Medieval vagrancy statutes forced able-bodied males into the workplace, while ancient principles of ''entire'' contract kept them there. A worker hired for a period of time - often five to 10 years and beyond - was legally not entitled to any of his earnings unless and until he completed the entire term of his contract. When rules of vagrancy and entirety failed, judges turned to other precedents, some dating from the time of Richard II, requiring workers seeking employment to obtain a ''testimonial letter'' from their previous employer. Because employers were under no legal obligation to provide such letters, judges could effectively stop workers from ever trying to move on. full: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/272/focus/Lavatory_and_Liberty+.shtml Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
