Why do employers deny their employees toilet breaks? Do they actually believe it makes the employees more productive, or are they just cruel people?

Why not both? I've met my share of idiots measuring productivity wrong, and there needs to be a chain of idiots all the way up to let this escalate to a lawsuit (chains of idiots I've also seen). But I've also seen cruelty on occasion, and you need to have no empathy with your workers to have made this call in the first place.

A combo of management control and a very tiny number of people who abuse any freedom given to them, then blame you for not telling them they couldn’t do it, and then blame you for singling them out.

As an anecdote - we had no sick leave policy at a previous job. It was just tell us when you’re sick and you won’t be in. One guy joins and starts calling in on Mondays, or Fridays of bank holiday weekends. He eventually got caught saying he had been on a trip on one of those weekends and was called up on it. He told everyone it was bulshit because he was being singled out and targeted unfairly. Then we got a sick leave policy that applied to everyone.

Unsurprisingly, this guy was also the reason we needed permission to WFH, had formal expense limits when travelling, and core working hours during the day. He ruined it for 30 other people because he took advantage of every flex we had.

It's a demonstration of power. Which is exactly why it needs fighting against, because these people (i.e. Dyson) must not have power.

There are countries where white collar office workers are banned from having drinks, including even a bottle of water at their desks.

You'd be amazed what is legal or at least normalized/tolerated when regulations are weak.

people who lack imagination. Its much easier to believe that people are out to get you as opposed to facing your own failed decisions.

It's low trust and they want to avoid abuse of toilet breaks so they set rules on number of breaks and duration...

Coincidentally in Eastern Germany they (or so I heard) had a "keys to the toilet" trope, meaning that whoever managed to obtain any kind of position (being entrusted with controlling access to a vital facility) could and often would then go and take advantage of it by expecting bribes-in-kind from people.

In the case of James Dyson it's almost certainly pure malice. Horrible man.

It could be that they are complete psychopaths with no respect for human life, or it could be that a minority of employees abuse toilet breaks but labour protection laws make them unfireable.

Employers are not always very smart. It took humanity half a millennium to realise slavery is inefficient and ditch it. Go figure.

Like someone mentioned already, it's a demonstration of power. But it goes well beyond that: it's about domination, discipline, constant monitoring, the reduction of individual agency, humiliation (you need permission for a basic human need) etc. The labour process theory says that that management systems are not only about coordinating work but about securing control over workers, that the drive for efficiency is also a drive for managerial control, including monopolising judgement and pacing work from above [0]

In many cases it's an intentional dehumanisation of the workers - they're seen as assets or numbers, as a type of machines that should be worked to their maximum physical and mental capacity and that are not owed any dignity [x], as if work is nothing more than mechanics. Foucault (in his "Discipline and Punish") speak about how disciplinary power produces "docile bodies" by making bodies more useful and easier to control, breaking functions and movements into optimised segments. [1] This is consistent with how the capitalist workplace normally operates, where employers want to control workers' time and actions, not just the finished product. We could see the toilet restriction just as an extreme, contemporary expression of the same thing. [2] For example, dodgy Amazon does that by making bathroom use hard and uses strict worker monitoring mainly as control/discipline thing, a sort of integrated control architecture (crazy pace + surveillance + comparison + dystopian ranking and whatnot) [3][6]

For all his faults, Heidegger's point (especially in his writing on technology) is relevant here, as he claims that modern systems tend to treat everything as a resource to be ordered, measured, and used. He says that things and people get turned into "standing-reserve" (basically stock to be managed) [4]

Many employers believe that loo breaks should happen in a workers' own time [5], which is both ridiculous and an shirking of responsibility towards society from businesses (which has always been the case).

What is certain is that this is certainly not as a serious productivity argument, despite what predatory companies like Amazon claim [z], because this kind of treatment can have (and often does, like the article shared above shows as well) severe consequences for health, dignity, and productivity. [7]

The fact that regulatory bodies like OSHA in the US, and especially in the EU, recognise the abuse pattern shows it's not just anecdote or rhetoric (like the Economist and similar papers often suggest), or that it applies to countries that aren't as developed as we like to think we are in the US and the UK, but a real issue that's rather common.

Also relevant: https://www.un.org/en/observances/toilet-day

[0] https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article/43/1/61/7684997

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

[2] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/14546...?

[3] https://cued.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2023/10/Pa...

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

[5] https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/give-us-loo...

[6] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/09/they-treat-us-worse-than-an...

[7] https://sif.org.uk/why-workplace-toilet-access-matters/

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/19/thousands-uk-w...