I recently left a corporate job that was incredibly toxic in many ways. I put in my 2 week notice, but they told me I was “terminated” the same day but they would pay me for my last 2 weeks. Guess what, my final check never came, shocker!
So I called HR and they told me to come in to their office and they would give me a check instead of direct deposit. As I was waiting for 45 minutes at a table in their conference room I noticed a posted note on my employee file that said “calculate 5 breaks per day”. I was a salary employee who never even left the office for lunch, and I never really took “breaks”? When I asked the HR representative what that meant, she told me that she was also leaving this job, and that my employer was tracking all employee bathroom breaks! We have a scanner/ card that unlocks the bathroom but I thought that was for security. Turns out they look at how many times someone is going in the bathroom.
Apparently, on paper, this is not illegal because they don’t “use it as part of a performance evaluation”. I was told they use it incase there is a security breach they know who was at their desk or who might be in the restroom or another conference room. We work in a very secure and highly regulated industry and if someone breaks into our office we have to immediately follow a set of rules, sometimes evacuate, or put locks on our computers.
But, the HR rep told me that she is going to report them to the department of labor because she believes they have used this “information” when evaluating employees. Yikes.
I learned that I enter the bathroom on average 5 times per day. Sometimes to wash my hands, sometimes to get away from people, and sometimes to actually use the restroom. I’m so happy to be out of that place.