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Let me break out all of my red crayons and draw you a picture:
You are sitting at your desk and oh no, it’s happened. The tampon has given up the ghost. Or maybe Aunt Horror has arrived for her visit ahead of schedule. You reach into your purse and, oh snap, you remember you gave your last pad to another desperate member of the crimson covenant.
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Wouldn’t it be so chill if your workplace had a basket of free menstrual products to get you through your day so you don’t have to jury-rig a pad out of toilet paper and wrap a Cotton Ginny sweatshirt around your waist and pray you don’t leak onto your chair? No? Just me in Grade 6?
Well, very soon, this will be a reality in a lot of workplaces. Beginning in August, all provincially regulated companies must provide free menstrual products to their employees in washrooms or other accessible areas.
Many places already do this, and it goes beyond employees; I’m always happy to see baskets of products in restaurant bathrooms for customer use, as opposed to encountering a defunct metal box that hasn’t been stocked since 1994 vending “sanitary napkins” for 25 cents a pop.
Of course, some people are fretting about the cost, which estimates suggest will be about $10 to $25 per menstruating employee annually, and an initial cost of $20 to $300 for a dispenser and disposal container. (That last part seems unnecessary; a basket and garbage can would do.)
Employers provide all kinds of hygiene items. Toilet paper. Hand soap. Sanitizer. Maybe even facial tissue if you work somewhere fancy. This isn’t different from that. At all.
As with all initiatives like this, people worry about other people “abusing the system.” This is very much an “in a pinch” situation.
We menstruators all have pretty specific preferences for what we look for in hygiene products because everyone’s period and anatomy are different. And with the advent of reusables, such as period underwear and cups, disposables are not even a lot of people’s first choice these days.
Will the pads and tamps be stolen from time to time? I don’t know, maybe! But it’s still a net good that supports the dignity of your workforce.
Honestly, if men got periods, not only would free hygiene products be blasted out of confetti canons on street corners, they would get free steaks and a paid week off every month because, top tip, having to work through pain sucks.
Actually, no, science probably would have figured out a way for them to simply unsubscribe.
And if you suffer from any of the litany of understudied and underfunded chronic conditions that make your period especially heinous and unpredictable – I have endometriosis, which meant, pre-medication, my period was heavy and painful, but I also have PCOS, which meant I also never knew when it was coming – having a tiny bit of support in the form of accessible hygiene products when you find yourself up the crimson creek without a tampon is a welcome development.
But, like the Little Mermaid famously sang, I want mooooooore. I want research and funding and paid sick days that aren’t called “period days” so they can’t be weaponized against us later.
I want faster diagnoses and doctors to believe our pain and for no one to ever again be dismissed with an ibuprofen and a prayer.
The bar really is in the basement, isn’t it? Throw us a free pad.
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