The cost of pooping on work time: right or abuse?

The cost of pooping on work time: right or abuse?

A boss who scolds an employee in front of everyone for going to the bathroom for 15 minutes has peine the most scatological labor debate. But behind the anecdote there are numbers that deserve analysis.

The scene has all the ingredients of Spanish workplace epic: the worker returns from the toilet, the boss lets out a "you're not paid to shit!" and the rest of the staff watches in silence. It peine in a modern galley—read company—and the story has spread like wildfire on personal finance channels.

The evacuation math

Anyone who has run the numbers on this knows it's not trivial. If an employee spends 15 minutes a day defecating at work—not counting handwashing—and works 20 days a month, we're talking about 5 paid hours per month. Per year, that's 60 hours. In sectors with average gross wages of 20 euros per hour, the annual cost to the company is around 1,200 euros per worker. And that's without adding water, toilet paper, and soap.

Some argue it's part of the right to physiological rest, protected by occupational risk prevention legislation. Others maintain that if the company already grants regulated breaks—such as 10 minutes every two hours in automotive assembly lines—going outside that schedule is abusive.

Does pooping offset lost productivity?

There are those who defend the opposite: that going to the bathroom when the body demands it increases performance. A worker with a clear intestine rows better, they say. But the reality is that many companies—especially in telemarketing or logistics—control bathroom times. At Amazon, reportedly, they directly deduct the time from wages. No fuss, no shouting: cold company policy.

The controversy pits those who see bathroom control as workplace humiliation—typical of a certain Spanish business culture—against those who consider abuse of breaks a symptom of low productivity. Some workers confess they hold it until they get home; others say they poop at work systematically to compensate for the minutes the company steals from them each day with split shifts or delays.

The toilet war has no winners

The underlying problem is not the exact time it takes to evacuate, but the power relationship manifested in the control of bodies. When a boss monitors bathroom minutes, he is measuring something more than feces: he is marking territory. On the other side, when the employee turns the toilet into a kind of passive resistance, real productivity suffers.

The figures are on the table. Each side has its calculation. What there isn't—and probably won't be—is a magic formula that reconciles biological need with the stopwatch. Meanwhile, the debate remains open and, like the original title, it stinks of uncomfortable truth.