Sounds right. On the flip side there are jobs where random bathroom breaks don't really work.

EG: bus driver.

So I am actually not sure how that works for a pregnat bus driver. Letting her randomly stop the bus at rush hour to pee doesn't seem fair to the commuters. Probably in practice pregnant bus drivers get assigned to a short route or something like that.

I don't know the nature of Amazon warehouse work. It's possible that unscheduled bathroom breaks affect multiple people (eg, I am peeing and you are idle because you depend on me to do your task) - that's the only condition where this feels at all conscionable.

If you really wanted to optimize something involving living consciousness beings like a machine, at least you should consider things like the need to take a piss as a hard constraint and design the system around it.

Don't get me wrong I love factorio like the next guy and understand the idea behind your thinking, but there should be limits to that thinking in the real world. And if that doesn't convince you consider the efficiency loss of a depressed worker with a urinary tract infection.

Honestly - and I don't mean that as an insult - I hope for you to experience (just once) the loss of dignity that not being able to visit the restroom on your own decision will give you. Might make you realize the hell this kind of thinking leads to.

You've never been on a bus where the driver had to stop to go use the restroom? There is no prohibition against that.

Many bus routes are designed with stopping/break points, including limiting route lengths so that operators aren't stuck in these conditions.

Yes, at 5pm in a major city, a bus driver might pull up next to a convenience stop, stop the bus, go pee, and come back. Does it happen often? Not that often, because of the aforementioned "we design routes so people aren't trapped for multiple hours" concept.

look man you might just consider not commenting about stuff you know absolutely nothing about. it's totally ok to just not speak up and use it as an opportunity to learn.

Both jobs already need to be designed around some expectation for how often people need to use the restroom. If individual exceptions are not feasible, they design the job so that it works for everyone.

What the fuck?

Edit: Sorry to be brusque. You're suggesting that it's conscionable to disallow a bathroom break that would inconvenience customers or cause a fellow employee to be unable to progress? That category of work culture should be unheard of in the USA, but it's leaking in, and if we don't viciously reject it, we might as well start the country over.

If bathroom breaks are frequently causing some kind of unacceptable complication, then the problem isn't the bathroom break, it's the design of the position.

Turns out depending on the metro they already solved that problem.

Just let them piss.

They actually do let bus operators randomly stop the bus at rush hour to pee in some cities. In Ottawa (Ontario), for instance, as long as an operator is within their 5 minute "late standard" window, they can stop and make a quick pee break or Timmy's break as long as they keep the bus in time.

The busses lock down with a PIN when they get out of the seat (generated that morning at the depot) so you can't take it out of neutral anyways to try to steal it.

https://www.michaelsuddard.com/2013/03/oc-transpo-condoned-t...

(Best part is this old blogpost with someone cranky over the stop as well getting shown receipts by OC Transpo that their Tim's wielding bus driver that morning was in fact running on time based on GPS data.)

Whether you're stowing, picking, diverting, or working the dock... you literally just grab someone to cover your position for a few minutes. That's it. There are process assistants present who can literally do that if they have to. There's no reason to deny a pregnant worker this except "This is making my day harder because I can't run my aisles at an absolute minimum head count and still stand around with my cart pretending to do useful work".

The only real case I could see where grabbing someone to cover you while you take a bathroom break might not work is, for example, someone working as a yard marshal... since that's not something everyone gets trained for, so the pool of replacements is smaller (including among process assistants).

So unless this worker was working the yard... there's not a lot of reason to deny them bathroom breaks... and that goes whether they're pregnant or not honestly.