Yes, exactly. I don’t know what I’m more irritated by, the pervasive “blame it on the immoral individual” take that misses any structural frame, or the equally individualistic “building manager traumatized!” panic narrative. Sure, excrememt is unsightly and all, but ramping everything up on the emotionalization scale is good to sell a news story, I guess, but it doesn’t help understanding the situation.
A friend of mine worked as a package delivery person for exactly one week. She said her schedule was organized in such a way that she had to sort her things an hour before her actual shift started (but she had to be there for it anyway), then was so tightly packed that there was no break, and there was also no opportunity to have a toilet break anywhere in the entire schedule. She had to in essence hold it in for 8+ hours.
We all know there are moments when that really, really no longer works. Now, of course, you could pick the next bush (if the place even has green spots), sure. Or you could, you know, utilize the critical force of anger, of not hiding your pain, and making it obvious. Can we call that a small revolutionary act in a stifling system?
I had not even thought about that, I guess in part because around here we only have fast food and casual, plus exactly one “fancy” place that isn’t on door dash at all (I assume given how you need to “book ahead” for a spot in the takeaway line, and they have a long line of cars there that they just plain don’t need extra demand from door dash at a lower profit margin).
Still I think if you have someone come pick up your product, and you get paid for it they are your customers. So if the law requires you have restrooms for customers it ought to apply to independent delivery contractors. That would be a perfect thing for the delivery drivers union to get right on…oh…rats, no union.
I like to think that we do…or more accurately that the USA has 50 different sets of laws and at least some are equitable. Your life may have given you a very different experience though, and I’m absolutely not saying you are wrong (i.e. it worked out ok for me, but I’m a sample of one, it could be all luck, and most of that luck could have been in getting a light skin tone at birth). CA’s for restaurants look like this:
Restaurants, coffee shops and other eat-in food facilities must provide clean restrooms for customers and guests. For larger buildings of more than 20,000 square feet, there should be at least one separate restroom for men and one for women; smaller buildings meet code if they provide one single-occupancy restroom. Buildings of less than 20,000 square feet constructed before 2004 do not have to provide public restrooms but they must alert customers to this fact with prominent signage. Where there’s no public restroom, it’s up the individual establishment to decide whether it lets customers use the restroom facilities meant for employees.
Which doesn’t really talk about delivery drivers, I assume because they were not common when this was drafted.
In my city there are no longer any publically accessible toilets. Every business owner complains that people are defecating in public, which I agree is gross.
No shit, Sherlock! If they’re being refused to use a toilet where do you think they can go?? Your protesting of public toilets because it ‘encourages homeless people to stay here’ is even grosser.
I pooped on campus once, not in a bathroom, but just off the loading dock of a building to be used later in the evening for a fundraiser because there were no bathrooms available for quite a while (and the bathrooms of this building, usually open to the public, were closed off “for an event”…
