transcriptroopers:

I was reflecting on my time in service, one of the last asks I answered, and the reports from earlier this year regarding Amazon employees and their access to restrooms during working hours. Workers reported that the only accessible bathrooms were a long walk both ways, and when your productivity is being monitored by the second, even a five minute bathroom break can jeopardize your job. Thus, it was reported, some workers peed in water bottles to avoid leaving their station. Others simply didn’t drink for their twelve hour shifts.

There are a few things I’d like to talk about regarding the military and our Pee Time.

I’ve read through a few articles on this now, and there’s a fact that I think needs addressing when we talk about workers peeing in bottles on the job: the workers that do this are almost exclusively cis male. They have to be; it is hard if not impossible for a cis woman to pee in a water bottle. 

When you consider this, an additional fact becomes apparent: women who work in Amazon warehouses have no choice but to take the time penalty and walk to a bathroom. This, combined with the general consensus that women take longer to complete their business, is probably affecting how Amazon hires, fires, and treats its female workers. 

I reach this conclusion based on how female soldiers are treated for the same reasons. When I was enlisted, it was a well-known fact that sometimes, soldiers peed in bottles. They just do. Sometimes they do it even if they don’t have to. Like, literally, in their barracks rooms. When deployed, it seems easier than the long hot walk to the bathroom. 

So you can imagine soldiers aren’t so shy about doing this on the job either, especially in my branch: in an ADA unit we were locked in small confined boxes for twelve hour shifts and discouraged from leaving. During deployment we sometimes worked 48 hour shifts, with our meals brought to us and with no sleep. This was all for the purpose of training, of course; there was never an actual threat or a reason we couldn’t leave our stations, we just Couldn’t. 

So units with female soldiers must consign themselves to the fact that their soldiers will demand bathroom breaks, and they will demand actual toilets to take them in. Furthermore, because male soldiers can’t pee in a bottle in front of a female, they too must take bathroom breaks. This develops into a similar culture you see in schools, where asking to go to the restroom is thought of as an excuse to get out of work, especially if you’ve gone too recently. It’s worse for lower-enlisted, who already have very little autonomy. Sexual assault is so bad that we mandate new recruits to go to the bathroom in “battle buddy” pairs, like kindergartners. An especially ornery NCO might make you run there, “’cause if you gotta go that bad you had better run!” and time you, which can be a very different experience for men and women. 

Males can easily go in their full battle gear: unbutton, do the business, rebutton, head out. Cis women can’t do this, meaning you have to add time for taking all of your gear off/putting it on. I watched this in real time in the army when waiting in line for portable toilets: female goes in one, and while you hear her fighting and thumping around with her battle gear, four or five males pass through the other by the time she comes out again. Male soldiers will just leave the line until she emerges. Our gear and uniforms are built for cis men to pee with, and we know this, but as is our culture we often blame the female soldier for that.

It’s easy to neglect these sorts of problems when considering how equitous the army is, but it’s even easier to get lost in the sauce about small-time solutions instead of looking at the big picture. For example, the FUDD, or Female Urinary Diversion Device, researched by the U.S. Army in 2009 but gained traction in 2014 when female soldiers were starting to get accepted to combat units. It’s a device that female soldiers must buy, carry, and maintain in order to adapt to the harsh conditions of the field, including the necessity to urinate with men nearby.

This is ludicrous. Why is the army profiting off of the inhumane conditions that it’s forcing its own soldiers to endure? These are grown men and women, many of whom came from poor working-class families, who are sometimes mandated to wear (and thus purchase) adult diapers and then remain in them, soiled, for hours at a time for the purpose of “training.” It has complete control over the suffering, but it merely sells us products that soften the suffering. Or they have us shit and piss in the bush around our worksite, biohazards be damned. 

The fact is that these conditions are not rare. The Amazon warehouse is just one small example of how workers’ rights are being restricted under threat of violence. It is not exaggeration to call them human rights violations. If you can’t eat, drink, or go to the bathroom 50-80 hours a week at the risk of losing your job, and thus your livelihood, you’re not a worker: you’re a wage-slave. 

Many other workers have started coming forward about being forced to relieve themselves in undignified ways to spare their jobs. I’m asking everyone to take a moment to reconsider the unwritten rules in your job, and in what other ways your rights are being infringed upon.

– Kingsley