Weekly round-up: Toilet troubles, sandwiches, and Nike redundancies

In this week’s round-up of HR news, Services Australia employees are being timed and shamed over how long they spend on the toilet. A cleaner was also fired after eating a leftover tuna sandwich at a law firm. Meanwhile, global sporting brand Nike is letting go of a number of staff to cut costs.

Day in loo

As reported by ABC News, Services Australia employees have been publicly humiliated and are facing disciplinary action if they take longer than five minutes to go to the toilet. Services Australia has vowed to investigate these reports, with independent Senator David Pocock being stunned at the reports.

Employees have reported having their names and the length of time they are away from their desks displayed on office whiteboards. The agency requires call centre staff to enter auxiliary codes into their computer when they change activities, a practice it said is required to manage demand. The code that is entered when staff need to go to the toilet or fill up their water bottle allows a five-minute screen break.

Senator Pocock believes that this is unacceptable: “Any minutes over that five minutes which you’ve ‘stolen’ from the agency is in some cases being put up on a whiteboard. You’ve got people doing their training on their lunch break to try and make up for a few minutes.”

“How is it acceptable to use someone’s minutes that they take on a toilet break over five minutes to put that on a whiteboard and publicly humiliate people in your agency?”

The deputy chief executive of customer service delivery, Jarrod Howard, insisted the codes, which are entered when changing tasks or leaving the desk, are necessary to direct call centre traffic and denied the claim of timing toilet breaks.

“We have done a lot of work to bust what I say is a myth. It is not acceptable, and I’m not aware of it happening,” Mr Howard said.

“There will be times [when] staff will be coached by their team leader about the fact they may have been in an auxiliary code for longer than what is expected. If they are utilising reasonable time to go to the toilet, that is not something we are going to have a code of conduct breach for.”

Sacked over a sandwich

An Ecuadorian cleaner is suing a law firm after she was fired for eating a leftover tuna sandwich she found in a meeting room. Gabriela Rodriguez was fired by a cleaning company working for the firm after she ate a A$2.90 tuna sandwich; the firm called the cleaning company and complained that leftover sandwiches were not returned. Ms Rodriguez was then let go for taking client property without authority or reasonable excuse.

Ms Rodriguez is now suing for unfair dismissal and is backed by a strong social media campaign by the United Voices of the World union.

The union said on Facebook: “Gabriela is an Ecuadorian single mother who, after two years cleaning the offices of a corporate law firm, was summarily sacked just before Christmas on grounds of theft. The theft in question being a £1.50 Tesco tuna sandwich that she ate, which was left over from a lawyers’ meeting, and was due to be discarded.”

“Sacking cleaners on ridiculous grounds like this – treating them like the dirt they clean – is not uncommon, though [it] is always outrageous, and in UVW, we always fight back. We are taking the case to court, but that takes time, and justice delayed is justice denied, so in the meantime, we’ll be doing what we do best and fighting back through direct action.”

‘Just do it’ for another company

According to CNN, Nike plans to let go of 2 per cent of its employees, equating to 1,700 people, as the sporting behemoth looks to cut as much as US$2 billion in costs.

“The actions that we’re taking put us in the position to right-size our organisation to get after our biggest growth opportunities. While these changes will impact approximately 2 per cent of our total workforce, we are grateful for the contributions made by all Nike teammates,” a Nike spokesperson said in a statement.

In its latest report, Nike, as a company, employed around 83,700 people worldwide as of 31 May 2023. Nike believes that consumers around the world are slowing their spending, which resulted in the company looking for up to US$2 billion in savings over the next three years to mitigate this consumer drop-off.

Customers’ changing behaviour and rising competition have led to Nike’s financial results to be gloomier in its outlook, thus the redundancies.