ORIGNAL ARTICLE: A former T-Mobile employee is speaking out about her terrible last few months working at a call center in Nashville, Tennessee. According to Kristi Rifkin, her ordeal started when she became pregnant with her second child and her pregnancy forced her to take a few extra breaks.

As Rifkin tells it in a blog post on MomsRising.org called Why I Believe in Paid Sick Leave, everything was going fine at her job until she got pregnant.

“It was a very, very rough pregnancy. I was taking medication to keep me from going into labor. I was going to the doctor twice a week, seeing both a regular obstetrician and a high-risk obstetrician. I had to drink a lot of water and go to the bathroom pretty frequently, which is what normal pregnant women do,” she says.

But her supervisor quickly warned her that frequent trips to the bathroom may cause her productivity to drop, which could result in her termination.

“Being on the phone was my job, so if I wasn’t, I risked being written up and possibly fired. Essentially the message was, ‘You can go, but understand that if you don’t meet that metric at the end of the day, week and month, we have the opportunity to fill your seat.’ They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use the toilet. But the reality was that this is a metric on how your job is measured and if you don’t meet it, then you do not have your job.”

Eventually, her supervisor told her that if she really had a medical necessity to use the bathroom so often, she should get a doctor’s note. Of course, she and her doctor thought it was ludicrous, but she complied.

After a sit-down with H.R., it was decided that Rifkin could use the bathroom as much as she wants, but T-Mobile wasn’t going to pay for it. That meant that she had to clock out and back in for every bathroom break.

“At the same time, I was under so much pressure to keep my sales up. I would sprint – as much as a heavily pregnant woman can — between my desk and the bathroom to make sure I squeezed every second I could out of my work day. Everything I did was scrutinized. I felt picked on. Someone was always watching over my shoulder, monitoring my performance,” says Rifkin.

In the end, she says she wound up using vacation time just to go pee.

Eventually, her doctor ordered full medical leave. The Family Medical Leave Act requires that employers provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave and job security for eligible employees – so Rifkin’s job was there when she got back after 7 weeks.

But not for long. According to ABC News, she was soon fired over what amounted to a small clerical error; apparently she “failed to remove an extra-charge feature from a customer’s account, the commission for which was 12 cents.”

“Moms shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and the health of their families. But too often, companies that are fixated on their bottom lines force women to make this choice. I know. It happened to me,” says Rifkin.

T-Mobile has made a statement. Although they won’t discuss specific employees, a spokesman said this:

“T-Mobile employees enjoy generous benefits including paid-time-off and short and long-term disability coverage. The company has leave of absence policies in line with regulatory requirements.”

UPDATE: I’ve received a lengthy and detailed comment from T-Mobile U.S. Chief People Officer Larry Myers:

Sensational headlines are hard to ignore. Here are some facts you should know:

• Of course we make reasonable accommodations for all of our employees when they need time away from servicing our customers’ needs – and we did that three years ago in 2010 for this employee.
• Our industry-standard policies have been in place since 2008 and are understood by all of our call center employees.
• Beyond the breaks that are built into every shift for all of our call center employees, we have additional flexibility to give employees the time they need – especially when there is a medical need.
• After all reasonable accommodations have been exhausted, employees have a choice – they can take additional, unpaid breaks, or they can choose to apply their paid time off benefit. These decisions do not result in adverse performance evaluations.
• When a medical situation is involved and there is even more need for time away from the job, we work closely with our employees to consider potential Leave of Absence (LOA), then consider Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) time off.
• For this particular former employee, all of these things were discussed and utilized.
• T-Mobile is a values-based organization that has 5 times in a row been awarded as one of the “World’s Most Ethical Companies.” And our employees continue to tell us that they enjoy working at T-Mobile. In a recent anonymous third party employee satisfaction survey, 78% of T-Mobile’s employees said they are satisfied with their job and 83% said they are proud to work at the company, placing T-Mobile on par with the top 25% of all companies surveyed in the United States.

Please consider the facts, and judge for yourself.

Larry Myers, Chief People Officer
T-Mobile US, Inc.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Open Road Films has decided to push back the release of Jobs. The film, which was originally slated for an April 19th release, is being postponed so that it can benefit from additional marketing, according to the sources.

There’s no new date to report, only that it’s been pushed back from April 19th.

Jobs (previously titled jOBS), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January. The reviews were mixed, with many praising Kutcher’s portrayal of Steve Jobs while at the same time dismissing the films as disappointing, “saccharine,” and “too respectful.”

“Jobs details the major moments and defining characters that influenced Steve Jobs on a daily basis from 1971 through 2000. Jobs plunges into the depths of his character, creating an intense dialogue-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is an immensely personal portrait of Steve Jobs’ life. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented access during shooting to the historic garage in Palo Alto, that served as the birthplace to Apple Inc,” according to the film’s producers Five Star Feature Films.

jOBS stars Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak. It also features Dermot Mulroney, Lukas Haas, J.K. Simmons and Matthew Modine. It’s directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who brought you the 2008 political comedy Swing Vote.

ABC News is reporting that at least 15 miners at the Agnew Gold mine in Western Australia were canned after posting their own version of the Harlem Shake to YouTube. The 15 fired miners include participants in the video as well as those who simply watched it take place.

According to Barminco, the company that runs the mine, the Harlem Shake constituted at safety hazard and did not represent the company’s “core values of safety, integrity and excellence.”

You can watch the totally innocuous underground Harlem Shake below and decide if you think it deserved this kind of response:

Not only were the miners fired from their current gig, but Barminco also banned the workers from being “subcontracted by Barminco at any site domestically and globally.”

All of this for 30 seconds of (admittedly ridiculous) fun.

If you think that the firing was a little over the top, you can express your support for the miners on the Reinstate the sacked WA Harlem Shake Miners Facebook page.

Vine co-founder Colin Kroll tweeted out the news on Tuesday.

One of those positions is “Lead Android Engineer.” Inside the job description for the Lead Android Engineer position, the top responsibility is to “lead development of the first version of Vine for Android.” So there you go.

Vine is also currently looking for a Dev-ops Engineer, Lead iOS Engineer, Product Designer, Software Engineer, and Software Engineer (Front-End).

Vine is expanding our 3 person engineering team in NYC. Join us:vine.co/jobs

— colin kroll (@ckb) February 19, 2013

Twitter’s Vine first launched back in January, on iOS only. Vine lets you take six-second videos and share them across other social networks. It received quite a bit of attention when it first launched, thanks to the fact that people will be people. You give them video capabilities, they’ll give you porn.

But Vine’s “porn problem” wasn’t really that much of a problem – except that the app made it too easy to find (remember, nudity isn’t banned on Vine).

To remedy that, Vine started blocking porn-related searches and slapped a 17+ mature rating on it in the App Store, likely to please the porn-nazis at Apple.

With the porn problem behind them, expanding into the Android platform will do nothing but improve Vine’s visibility across social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. We already knew that Vine would eventually make an Android version of their app, but this job posting confirms that they’re looking to do it. Now.

[h/t TechCrunch]

LinkedIn today announced that it has updated its job search page with a new look and new features.

Job searchers can now use advanced search options to narrow their search by industry, position, country, and zip code. A salary level filter is also available for users who subscribe to LinkedIn’s “Job Seeker Premium” service.

The new layout also prominently displays a “Jobs you may be interested in” section (with a sponsored sub-section) that surfaces jobs related to a LinkedIn member’s talents and previous work. A section at the bottom of the page now also lists companies where LinkedIn connections are employed, and a sidebar section automatically provides new results for saved job searches.

The social network has created a SlideShare presentation that highlights the major changes. A small privacy warning before viewing it, however: SlideShare announced earlier this week that its presentations can now include new tracking tools that can track metrics such as how long an individual user spends on each slide.

The video quality is bad, but it’s worth a watch. As a bonus, Jobs himself comes out and tells him he’s doing it all wrong.

Here’s a look at some of the early reviews, which are mixed.

CNET calls the film “saccharine” and says that viewers will spend two hours “watching cardboard cutouts lose arguments to Ashton Kutcher”:

My primary disappointment was in how shallow the film felt, given the extensive historical record. In the early days Jobs’ co-workers had to wrestle with a man who smelled bad, who cried often, who yelled constantly, who missed deadlines, who overspent his budget by millions. He did it in service of products we love and use daily, and yet his obsessions took a toll on those around him. He also inspired others to do the best work of their lives, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined they could go. There is great drama to be found in all that, but it is not to be found in the saccharine “jOBS.”

The Guardian gives the film two out of a possible five stars, calling Ashton Kutcher’s portrayal of Steve Jobs as a “surprisingly effective turn.” Still, The Guardian laments that it’s everything else that falls short:

The results, then, are mixed. This is far from the bomb some would have envisaged, but neither is it the character illumination one would wish for. Jobs appears so consumed by his work here that little else mattered in his life. That may be true, but we’re left none the wiser as to what made the man tick, beyond what we already know. Apple will no doubt feel satisfied, even relieved. Those wanting a sharper, more incisive view will have to wait for Sorkin.

The Hollywood Reporter says that the film is “a biopic that’s perhaps too respectful of the tech icon’s innovations still remains frequently engaging.”

Playing somewhat like a two-hour commercial covering the first 20 tumultuous years of Apple’s development, Joshua Michael Stern’s biopic of Steve Jobs is a passably entertaining account of the career of one of the 20th century’s great innovators that doesn’t break any stylistic ground, hewing closely to public perception of the tech giant.

Writing for Gizmodo, reader Seth Kinkaid gives a fan’s review. He says that despite some clear inaccuracies and exaggerations, “it was the experience [he] wanted.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what I would get, but it turned out to be surprisingly nice. It was… satisfying. It also proved that I could enjoy Ashton Kutcher’s acting as Silicon Valley’s most prized CEO. Although his performance wasn’t perfect, it felt right. The rest of the movie was just as good.

The Next Web’s Matthew Panzarino calls the film “entertaining, if impressionistic,” but adds that “this isn’t going to be the canonical Steve Jobs biography movie.”

[O]verall, jOBS works. The lead actors are likable and appear to have put serious effort into getting the spirit of the characters right. The film looks (mostly) good aside from some of what could likely be ascribed to budgetary constraints. And though the director is a tad indulgent here and there, it doesn’t take away from the overall feeling of ‘decent’ that I came away with.

Film School Rejects gives it an upside…

An often-solid performance by Kutcher; a very solid series of supporting performances (particularly by Gad); surprisingly well-paced and quite entertaining.

..and a downside:

Relies on basic and unimaginative filmmaking tricks, particularly a score calibrated to make audiences think “something triumphant and bold is happening!” and long-winded montage sequences; “tells” rather than “shows” large swathes of character development and exposition; leaves many unanswered questions (you know, like, why computers?).

Check here for more coverage of jOBS.

Now, thanks to a tweet from Kutcher himself, we finally know that made-up old Ashton Kutcher also looks like older Steve Jobs.

Check out the side-by-side:

jOBS premiered at Sundance last Friday. It will be released to a worldwide audience on April 19th.

Last week, the first clip from the film hit the web. In case you missed it, you can see it again here. It features Kutcher and co-star Josh Gad, who plays Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, discussing Wozniak’s operating system, planting the seeds (pun semi-intended) for what would become Apple.

It should be noted that the real Wozniak has already made comments about the scene saying it didn’t happen that way, but it is, after all, a movie.

The film itself has received mixed reviews so far, but that’s to be expected from any film, let alone any film documenting the life of the controversial Steve Jobs.

Kutcher and Gad are set to appear at MacWorld/iWorld this week to talk about their experiences playing Jobs and Wozniak respectively. My guess is that we’ll hear more about Kutcher’s diet and hospitalization when that happens. They’ll speak on the main stage on Thursday.

jOBS hits theaters on April 19.

Kutcher and Gad will appear at Macworld/iWorld next week to talk about their experiences playing the roles of Apple’s co-founders.

The film also got an official release date this week: April 19.

[via Slashgear]