Imagine being told at your job that you are not allowed to sit during your 8 or 9 hours shift. How will you react? Well, this is what happened to these workers working in a smoothie shop as they posted the TikTok video over this issue and now the video has gone viral.
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A TikTok video has gone viral on social media after it shows the cruel workplace policy where the workers are not allowed to sit during their shifts, which can go over eight hours in these often understaffed places.
The name of the place is Tropical Smoothie Cafe, where workers are spending the slow periods making videos about how they have to contort themselves, do yoga poses, or just collapse on the counter if they want to rest.
“When your [sic[ not allowed to sit at work,” the overlay text reads as young people in Tropical Smoothie uniforms crouch and wall-sit in a desperate attempt to give their aching feet some relief.
“No chairs in sight,” reports the TikTok user who posted the video.
The idea of these anti-chair policies seems abhorrent. It seems like it is inspired by the British palace guards who are only allowed to stand still the whole day with lots of focus.
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Whatever the reason, there have been multiple calls for businesses like Tropical to drop these anti-chairs for workers policies, urging companies to at least provide chairs in the back for employees to sit where customers can’t see them. The young people in the video are seen desperately standing on one foot like flamingos as they try to give their body some rest.
Clearly this is not about looking “professional” or whatever to the smoothie seekers, so what’s going on here, Tropical? It doesn’t seem like they’re paying their workers enough to put up with this, based on another recent video by the same TikTok user.
Many people also think that the company should be providing seating for customers because of their disabilities, including the invisible ones that make it difficult and dangerous for people to work. Forcing disabled workers to request accommodations is not an acceptable solution as many such workers have faced retaliation and been fired from their jobs for doing so.
Folks on TikTok appear to mostly agree that the anti-sitting policies need to go.
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“I don’t understand the no sitting rules, what’s with the belief we can’t be productive sitting,” wondered one commenter on the Tropical Smoothie video.
“We had a manager that would tell us we weren’t allowed to sit & even moved the chairs away,” wrote another. “Yet she sat in the office her whole 10 hour shift.”
TikTok