When Zay clocked into her customer service job one recent morning, she noticed things looked different. There were no chairs in the break room. She had nowhere to sit at the table where she usually files invoices. When she reached the back of the store, there was one lonely folding chair propped against the wall. “Not for employee use,” read a handwritten note taped on the metal.
When employees asked their boss what had happened, they learned about a new no-sitting policy. Hopefully, the business owner said, this would “increase worker productivity”.
But Zay, who is 27 and lives in Atlanta, said it was hard to feel productive when she couldn’t rest during her breaks, especially as the process of opening the store required a lot of heavy lifting. It could leave her feeling back pain for the rest of the day, and sitting down made things much more comfortable. (Zay asked that her last name not be used.)
Standing for long periods of time is part of the job description for servers, cashiers and retail employees – and managers want it that way. In the 1960s, Ray Kroc, the CEO who took McDonald’s from a small-time local chain to a global franchise, had a catchphrase: “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” Today, it’s still uttered by bosses in kitchens and warehouses to deter workers from slacking off – or merely taking breaks.
It’s a uniquely American ethos. Cashiers in Europe, and notably at the German grocery store Aldi, are welcome to sit down during their shifts. Zay said a British friend who had visited the US recently was jarred by the sight of workers constantly on their feet: “Why are they all standing?”
The same rules do not apply, obviously, to people with desk jobs. (Though sedentary workers face their own share of ailments that come from a life of sitting down from 9 to 5.)
“I think it’s a very classist thing,” Zay said. “No one would dare criticize a lawyer for sitting on the job. But in retail or the service industry, when the job is deemed to be unskilled labor, people get irrationally offended when they see you sitting.”
Despite her boss’s hope, Zay does not think removing chairs will make anyone work harder. In fact, she knows it has gutted staff morale. “I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of standing being more productive, because from my perspective, people are much less productive when they’re in pain,” she said. “The irrationality of it is so astounding.”’
The boss’s warning has not stopped Zay from finding a spot to sit down. She’s noticed there’s a patch of floor that is just out of reach of security cameras. There, she plops down in between customers.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is ample evidence documenting the negative health effects of standing too long at work. Some of it is obvious: fatigue, lower back pain, tiredness and swollen legs. But there are also long-term risks associated with being on one’s feet for too long: it increases the risk of cardiovascular problems and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Zay posted about her experience on the subreddit r/antiwork, a group for people who “want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles”. The post received more than 1,500 comments, in which service, retail and other customer-facing workers agreed that they were made to stand at work for arbitrary reasons.
“Employers who expect their staff to stand during an entire shift deserve exactly zero employees,” one user wrote.
“The no-sit-down policy is the stupidest thing ever created by managers,” another said.
In a TikTok video viewed more than 2.8m times, Dairy Queen employees showed how they passed the time while being denied seats in the kitchen. One squatted on the ground, another balanced precariously on a trash can and another did lunges with a mini stool.
Courtney, who is 35 and lives in Ohio, worked for five years as a cashier at a large cosmetics retail chain. There was a strict no-sitting policy, and workers who were caught resting would be written up. Sometimes she would go home after a long shift and cry when she took her shoes off. “My feet were red, swollen and painful to touch,” she said. “I dropped 40 pounds [20kg] from walking over 12,000 steps a day working there.”
Eva Keller used to work at a hotel in Anaheim, California, that did not allow employees to sit while working the front desk. That meant she became used to standing in one spot for eight hours a day while wearing uncomfortable dress shoes.
“I had cramping and charley horses in my feet,” Keller said. “I wore flats with inserts in them and we had cushions on the floor, but that doesn’t help if you’re doing 40 hours a week.”
Even after leaving her old job, Keller notices when she’s at a business that does not allow its employees to sit. “I always notice it,” she said. “I would never check into a hotel and ask to file a complaint with a manager because the person at the front desk was sitting. That’s just insane.”
Workers have advocated for the right to sit for over a century. In the 1880s, factory bosses took away chairs in the hope of speeding up production times. Their reasoning for doing so does not sound much different from what a store manager might tell their subordinates today. “It was thought that workers would be more attentive and engaged if they were standing,” said Robert Bruno, a professor and director of the labor education department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Ideologically, it was a way for the business to maintain control over the workers’ bodies.”
But employees fought back, and the “right to sit” movement became a pillar for early union organizers. Some states initially passed laws requiring that women have seats at work, due to their supposed delicateness.
“The initial labor legislation was clearly establishing a gender difference, that women shouldn’t be expected to work more than 12 hours, and that they should have some relief against having to stand, which was thought to be too burdensome,” Bruno said. “Eventually, labor organizers understood that this was something that should apply to all workers, male and female.”
By the 1910s, most states had right-to-sit laws. Some laws affecting women only were later repealed on the grounds of sex discrimination.
More than a hundred years later, American workers again find themselves advocating for the most basic of provisions. In 2018, Walmart agreed to pay $65m to 100,000 California cashiers in a class-action suit; they accused the company of failing to provide seating in accordance with state law. Bank of America and Safeway paid $15m and $12m, respectively, in similar suits.
Last year, New York state lawmakers introduced legislation that would require employers to provide “suitable seats” to all workers. The bill’s sponsor, a Bronx assembly member named Karines Reyes, is also a registered nurse and says the topic is personal. “Making accommodations for employees to have that option, to perhaps stand and sit whatever their duties allow them to, I think is fair and humane,” she told a local news reporter.
Zay, the Georgia worker, quit after her boss took away seating. She says she wasn’t the only employee to put in their notice after what her team has started to call chair-gate. Ultimately, she said, the move was emblematic of a toxic workplace in general.
“I want to point out that it’s employers like these who go on and on about how no one wants to work because they can’t accept the simple truth that no one wants to do back-breaking labor with insulting pay all for a boss who couldn’t care less about their wellbeing,” she said.
