Staff toilet

[thedogdaysareover]

I work in a building with public access, but there are no public toilets (currently or ever, it is an old building), only a staff toilet off the staff room. We don’t provide catering facilities so there is no legal requirement to have public toilets. Children come to the building. There are several local businesses around who do have toilets, and the clientele of the building live locally for the most part. Events we run here last half an hour tops.

A particularly obnoxious client has complained to higher management about the lack of toilet facilities and they have caved and said that this client and her child can use the toilets, as can anyone who asks I suppose, since they have set a precedent and parents will talk to each other about these things.

This will mean they go through the staff room (where we keep our bags and personal belongings, fridge, and a whole load of delivery boxes stacked up high: safely for adults but maybe not for a child who could pull stuff down on themselves if they were eager to have a rummage).

I have a problem with this because my stuff could get nicked, but also, what if a kid vomited/left faeces and urine on the seat, toilet paper all over the floor, as I have seen clients do in a similar building run by the same management: who is going to clean that up? In this other building they have dedicated cleaners who clean the toilets hourly. Not the case here. It’s a pretty horrible toilet, full of spiders and damp and I don’t want to spend too much time in there let alone clean it. We have cleaners who come in overnight.

We are getting a memo about this sometime soon, from a higher manager who has never even so much as visited this building in the two years I’ve been here even though he lives up the road.

I want to know what others think about it before I say anything. I come from a poor background and practically bankrupted myself through two degrees to get this job, and I am very unchuffed that I might have to be wiping up shit as part of my duties. The pay is crap, I am not a snob and I love my job.

AIBU?

I think you should point out that the insurance is unlikely to cover these people using the toilet, as well as that the company is no longer providing a safe area for staff belongings. Those two hints together would cause a rethink where I have worked before.

I had not thought about that, marvellous!! Thank you!

YANBU about the potential safety issue of random people coming into the staffroom where your belongings are kept, I worked in a shop once where everyone's bags were robbed by a thief who had walked into the staffroom. Tell your employer if they are enforcing this that they need to provide lockers for your personal belongings.

I second the insurance. We used to get demands to use our toilet a lot in a similar situation, but the insurance meant it was staff only.

YANBU. I had personal items stolen in a similar situation.

Ask for a meeting where you can discuss your concerns, then ask all the questions you have above but in a 'closed' format - i.e. when will you be providing lockers for our personal belongings given that you have now allowed non staff members through to use the toilet? Not 'if' but 'when'.
And something like 'we will be calling the cleaners to deal with any bodily fluids' not 'can we call the cleaners...' etc.

Fwiw, the same thing happened at our public building and every time there was a mess left, we called the managers down to inspect it. They didn't like it much... we refused to do any cleaning as we were not given training or appropriate clothing/protective equipment to clean up bodily waste.

Nice one people. Very helpful comments.