The week I turned sixteen, I got my first on-the-books job, as a hostess at a restaurant. The position had its challenges — don’t seat too many people in one section or that server will be slammed, but don’t underseat in another or that server will hate me — but the worst part was that, through lulls and through rushes, I had to stand up.

I’d clock in and take my position at the podium near the door. For the remainder of my shift, there I was: standing, sometimes for seven or eight hours. As I moved through food service jobs in the following years, I began to think of work as consisting of two categories: sitting down, and standing up.

In a country that hasn’t raised its federal minimum wage since 2009, the right to sit down may not be at the top of the list of workers’ demands, but for many who are subjected to arbitrary standing for hours on end, it is certainly on the list. While there are downsides to sitting-down jobs (as any office worker will tell you, it’s not great on the body or the mind to spend day after day hunched over a computer screen), the pointless discomfort of having to stand while performing work that could easily be done from atop a stool or a chair is particularly grating.