Let Them Sit Down

And Use the Bathroom, and Make Plans, and Eat Cake

I am self-aware enough to know that I’m at risk of becoming one of those annoying Americans who moves to Europe and then bores and irritates everyone with tales of all the ways that life is better over here. So I try to restrain myself, but sometimes I just can’t hold back. For instance, on the subject of traffic circles, like this one near my house:

Between my house and the grocery store (a path I travel frequently) there are several places where roads intersect, but instead of stoplights, we have traffic circles. I can’t understand why so many Americans hate and fear traffic circles. Traffic circles are better than stoplights! Or anyway, as an impatient person who hates to wait at stoplights and considers a red light at an empty intersection to be a personal insult, I love traffic circles.¹ You almost never have to stop even for a moment, let alone sit there in traffic feeling your irritation and blood pressure rise. You zip right through at full speed. Wheee!

But I digress.

The thing is, when you live in another country (or, in my case, in two other countries) you discover that sometimes other places handle things better than we do, and that what is normal to us is weird or even cruel to them. For instance, the way workers are treated in the US. Last week, in my post on Karens, I touched on the topic of low pay and rough working conditions for too many Americans, and I suggested that when workers are treated badly, we all suffer. So this week I will indulge myself and talk about a couple of labor policies in Europe that we ought to adopt in the US. Beginning with:

Let Them Sit Down

I took this photo at our local grocery store the other day. There is something in this photo that is normal in Europe and almost unheard of in the US. Can you spot it?

Please enjoy the view of the cat and dog food in aisle 1.

It’s a chair! In Europe, grocery store cashiers sit while they work. When you tell a European that American cashiers have to stand all day, their response is a totally baffled, “But why?” Good question! As someone who has shopped at least twice a week in European grocery stores for the past eight years, I can assure you that seated workers perform their jobs just as quickly and effectively as standing workers. Standing up is no more relevant to the job of cashier than it would be for someone who works in an office.

I suspect one reason US cashiers are required to stand is that it is expensive to purchase chairs for workers, and companies don’t have an incentive to make themselves less competitive by being the first to incur this new expense. I get that. While I would love to see a tax incentive for companies to buy chairs for their cashiers, I can also imagine this quirky little idea being shot down from the left (“Another corporate subsidy?!”) as well as from the right (“Another government program for people who should be standing on their own two feet?!”). But if companies don’t pay, the rest of us do. Standing at work all day causes myriad health problems, including chronic back pain, arthritis, and knee and foot injuries. These problems cost money and stress the capacity of our healthcare system.² In addition, the requirement that cashiers stand is an obstacle that keeps older and disabled workers out of those jobs. According to a report by Chana Joffe-Walt for This American Life, the number of people on disability has doubled since 2000, and in some towns a quarter of the adults are on disability. Many of these people would be able to work if they were allowed to sit down. So why not let them?

Let Them Use the Bathroom and Make Plans

I want to touch on two other European laws that companies could adopt to make life more humane for their workers. Labor law in the EU can read like utopian fiction to us Americans. For one thing, EU law mandates that workers get four weeks of paid vacation per year. I’ll let Keanu Reeves say it for me:

In addition, workers on the job for more than six hours at a time must be given a break. The length of these breaks varies by country but is usually at least twenty minutes and is longer for pregnant and nursing women. Let’s put it bluntly: In Europe, workers have a right that is denied to many American workers, to go to the bathroom. You can read about Amazon drivers who work fourteen-hour shifts with no bathroom break here, or about pregnant Amazon warehouse workers who are censured on the job for taking “too many” bathroom breaks here, or about workers in poultry-processing plants who must wear diapers to work here, or about the many other ways that US employers can monitor and restrict workers’ bathroom breaks here. Being able to go to the bathroom is as necessary to our health as clean air and water; bathroom breaks should be unrestricted, and also no one else’s business.

Second, as I mentioned last week, many companies in the US, particularly in retail and food service, use just-in-time scheduling. The EU directive on “Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions” prohibits this practice, and the US ought to have a law like this too. We all have our own personal idea of hell, and for an organized person like me, just-in-time scheduling would be it. Imagine never knowing when you will be working or how many hours you will get. Imagine never being able to make a budget because your income fluctuates from week to week. Imagine, as is all too common, having to close one night and open the next morning—working until 1am, sleeping in your car in the parking lot, and then starting up again at 6am, for instance. Imagine never being able to arrange steady childcare, or having to rely on expensive emergency options, or having to leave your kids alone at home or in your car while you work.

Beyond its impact on workers, just-in-time scheduling causes many problems that hurt our whole society. Workers who can’t plan their schedules experience stress, which imposes the associated healthcare costs on all of us. Many workers require more than one job to make ends meet, and just-in-time scheduling prevents them from keeping those jobs, forcing many workers who would be happy with steady full-time work or in part-time jobs with predictable hours onto public assistance.

Just-in-time scheduling puts enormous stress on workers’ children too. Research has shown that excess cortisol (the stress hormone) damages children’s developing brains, causing behavioral problems and blighting their academic promise. And while I’m speculating here, it’s possible that just-in-time scheduling leads to car crashes because of excess fatigue caused by disruptions to workers’ sleep. But all practical considerations aside, just-in-time scheduling is a terrible way to treat people. That’s why even though the policy helps companies avoid paying workers during downtimes so they can squeeze out a bit more profit, it should be illegal. Most companies can afford to pay workers to stand around (or sit!) doing nothing once in awhile, but can our country afford to pay for the damage just-in-time scheduling inflicts on workers and their families?

What do you think, readers? Have you observed practices in other countries that should be adopted in the US? Or ways Americans do things that other countries should adopt (like right turn on red!)? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

The expression “Let them eat cake,” supposedly uttered by Marie Antoinette,³ is meant to stand for clueless elitism and for solutions that don’t actually address the true problem. I hope my ideas in this post aren’t in the “Let them eat cake” category! But, just in case they are, here is a recipe for a terrific cake. It’s quick, easy, and inexpensive to make, and the resulting slices are sturdy enough to take to work or along on a hike for a quick pick-me-up. I have adapted this particular recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, but really this is just a regular pound cake, tarted up with coffee, because why not? Coffee is one of the great joys of life!

Let Them Eat Cake Coffee Cake

Ingredients (all ingredients should be at room temperature):

Two sticks (or 112gms) of unsalted butter

1-1/2c sugar

3 eggs

1/2c VERY strong coffee (see note at bottom for how I make it, or you can use a triple espresso from your favorite coffee shop)

1tsp vanilla

1-1/2tsp baking powder

2c flour

1/4tsp salt

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350F/175C. Butter and flour a loaf pan.

2. In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. You can use a mixer, but honestly this recipe is not fussy. I used to make this cake in my under-equipped kitchen when I was a college student, and I just mixed the butter and sugar by hand, and it was fine.

3. Add in the eggs one at a time, mixing to blend between each addition.

4. In a small bowl, mix the dry ingredients—the flour, baking powder, and salt.

5. In a measuring cup, mix the wet ingredients—the coffee and vanilla.

6. Beginning and ending with the dry ingredients, alternate adding dry and wet ingredients to the butter mixture, blending after each addition. I usually do five total additions.

7. Scrape the batter into the loaf pan and bake for about an hour until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

8. Cool for about 15 minutes and then invert out of the pan onto a rack. Let the cake cool completely before slicing it into generous slabs. This cake is great all on its own, or, if you want to get fancy, you can serve it with your favorite fruit or whipped cream.

Note: To make strong coffee Happy Wanderer-style, use a Melitta funnel and filter. Buy espresso-roast coffee that is ground for an espresso machine (the grind should be a fine powder) and put about 1/3c into the filter. Then slowly pour boiling water over, being careful to get all the grounds wet. This method makes the strongest, purest, most flavorful coffee you will ever taste. Guests to my home always need to be warned that my coffee is at least twice as strong as what they’re used to.

1. On the other hand, when you do come across a stoplight in Europe, you’re not allowed to make a right turn on red, even if there are no other cars or pedestrians around. Let me tactfully suggest that this is one issue where Europeans could learn from us!

2. Here’s an example of media bias (or perhaps of my particular media bubble): The overwhelming majority of articles I found when I googled “health problems of standing at work” were about the dangers of too much sitting, reflecting more media interest in the plight of white-collar workers than that of blue-collar workers. Don’t get me wrong: Too much sitting is also bad for us. The healthiest approach for all workers is a mix of sitting, standing, and walking around.

3. In fact, as this article notes, it’s unlikely that Marie Antoinette ever said any such thing, and in any case the expression was documented more than a century before Marie Antoinette lived. The actual French words are “let them eat brioche.” Brioche is in my opinion much more delicious than cake. Let ME eat brioche, I say!