I have been looking for manufacturing, assembly, production positions all over the Midwest. It’s absolutely shocking how many of them want you to work rotating shifts.
Look at the image I submitted. That company wants you to work 3rd shift one week, then 2nd shift the next, then 1st shift the next, and then repeat it over and over. How in the hell is that healthy?
And this requirement for rotating shifts is prevalent in so many job ads now. WTF is going on with the world?
Full job ad here:
This seems idiotic from the employer’s perspective. You’re limiting your pool of candidates a lot by requiring that their life can accomodate essentially 24 hours of possible shift time. Companies do shit like this and then complain “nobody wants to work anymore”
It is a selective filter. It seeks the most desperate because they will take any and all abuse.
They also leave the milisecond they can which means the company constantly has to find replacements and retrain them. Lots of resources wasted just to abuse people rather than maximize profit by treating people better.
Yeah well they have degrees or something that says it’s a good idea for profits or whatever and damn the consequences, so checkmate, prole.
This is true. I once had a boss with an MBA. I am highly skilled, had a decade under my belt at the company. She once almost laid me off one year because her and another middle manager thought I didn’t “fit with the team” any more.
Turns out I was just going through a divorce, was deeply depressed, and simply getting shit done and going home.
She knew but that MBA mentality just saw that I wasn’t joining extra calls, putting in extra hours, volunteering to manage projects, etc. It wasn’t even about department or company performance, we were in some of our best years ever. I discovered this years later after she was laid off, probably under similar circumstances. Fuck MBAs.
I find it awful how quickly extra work becomes normal, expected, minimum work.
I think part of the idea here is that people with options wouldn’t accept such an abusive schedule in the first place.
Meaning they don’t have to worry about increasing wages or providing benefits for people who work there for longer.
Slash education, raise cost of living, lower the minimum working age and forcing ppl to work shit jobs is actually viable.
I think there’s a political party whose whole platform is based on this for this very reason
As long as “temporary” foreign worker programs exist, there isn’t a shortage of labour as far as the elite are concerned.
A limited pool of local applicants is a benefit to them. Then they get to bring in foreigners who don’t know the value of their work in a western country and don’t know the laws that protect them, both labour laws and actual criminal laws.
They also import social unrest and friction, and foster resentment towards the foreigners instead of the capitalists. Essentially the reason why I am opposed to most forms of immigration, while subscribing to generally leftist ideals.
Also theyre being used to allow for continued captialist growth while ignoring issues that are leading to stagnant or even regressive birth rates.
A great example there being Justin Trudeau’s immigration policy.
People don’t want to work 3rd shift - the rest of the world (your family, sports…) all work 1st shift. 2nd shift is only slightly better. It is probably better for your life to work 3rd shift for 1 week of every 3, than 3rd shift constantly - those other 2 weeks you can live semi-normal and thus have friends.
It still sucks, probably the best compromise.
As someone who was forced to do this for a couple months when I was in the Army, rotating shifts destroys your ability to get good sleep, its horrendous to actually experience. It took about 2 months before people started getting so sleep deprived that people started failing PT (physical training) tests and it took the brigade commander looking at our battalion and asking “wtf is going on over there?” and hearing what our battalion had done to our shift schedule and put a stop to it. He called over every single soldier who failed their PT test to hear our excuses, and when most of us were first time failures and we all had the exact same complaint, by the time he got to me, he was like “You’ve been on rotating shifts, unable to sleep, and were forced to take this test after a shift when you’re completely exhausted like everyone else?” “yes sir” “ok, don’t expect that shift rotation to last, I’ll be talking to your battalion commander after this. Send in the next person.” Dude was ready to just start ripping into us but changed his tune right quick after hearing about the fucked up shift schedule and lack of any common sense in the leadership’s ability to plan properly. One of the few times where shit actually rolled uphill. Suffice it to say, before I even finished the drive back to my barracks, I was being called by my platoon sergeant that we’d have to a new schedule tomorrow and to just show up for swing shift like we normally would be on.
In the prison I worked at we would usually rotate shifts every 6 months, but our commander heard complaints about people being on day shift for so long at one time that they were getting burnt out dealing with 90% of the problem times with inmates, and instead of changing it to every 3 months, changed the rotation to every 2 days. Literally, 2 days on Day shift, 2 days on Swing shift, 2 days on Night shift, 1 day off, then back to days. And that last day was getting off shift at 6AM, doing PT until 8AM, Barracks Maintenance until 10 AM, then because of the rotation, we’d have to be back in at work at 5:30 AM the next day, so our 1 day off a week was only 19.5 hours, and you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep yet, otherwise you’ll be up all night before work the next day, so you force yourself to run on fumes, getting a haircut, getting food and supplies for the next week, etc. Then sleeping, so there was literally never any time to relax. It fucking sucked.
It’s the kind of thing that sounds “fair” to a executive who’s been trained to think about human resources like any other commoditized cog, with no concept of human physiology or empathy.
I don’t think you’re thinking about how hard this will absolutely fuck over your sleep. There is no way you can be a functional human being for those two weeks with this consistent and drastic of a schedule change.
I’d rather work third shift consistently, I’m a night person.
2nd shift is great if you don’t have a family. You’re asleep when the kids go to school, you’re at work when they get home. Can’t have dinner as a family. I like 3rd, I go in after the kids go to bed and I wake up in time to pick them up.
It also makes it harder for employees to do things that would give them a chance at getting a better job. Can’t go to college anywhere that requires attendance as part of the grade if you’re on a shift like that. Also can’t get another job that might turn into a better opportunity, they won’t deal with your constantly changing availability.
It’s a way if keeping the less favorable shift times at full working capacity while not having to pay more for those times.
Typically (back in the day) you may pay day shift employees $12 an hour, but in order to get enough people to choose night shift, they’d have to offer $14 an hour.
Then, of course, if you started nights and were actually asked if you’d like to move to days, if they needed more on day shift, no one would ever want to swap and except a pay cut in order to do it. Of course, if you got to keep your higher rate and move to days then everyone on days would get mad that they weren’t making as much.
So yeah, it’s all corporate bullshit so they can move you around to any hours they’d like in order to keep the 24/7 operation going and all shifts balanced with workers without having to change any pay rates.
A lot of people in this thread are saying the same thing. I can understand the surface level math of it all. But there has to be a cost to losing employees due to the harshness of the schedule and then having to hire and train new employees.
Look at the job posting that I posted. They are offering a referral bonus of up to $5,000. They probably would not need to do that if they weren’t having a hard time finding willing employees.
Just looking at the surface level math and saying it is because they don’t have to pay a differential is not taking in to account employee turnover or the need to pay referral bonuses to attract people.
That sounds like a problem for a year down the road, but if the company hits its marks this quarter the CEO gets a bonus.
Referral bonuses never happen at the start. It’s always after something like 6 months or a year of the referred employee being there, so depending on the job, there might not be great odds that both employees will still be present a year later.
Also, if it’s a job where the time to train isn’t that long, a high turnover rate may be exactly what the company wants. No raises, no long term employees trying to start a union, lower retirement costs, less people signing into benefits, no accrued sick time being used, etc.
Some companies operate on a “fuck you” budget.
companies don’t even have to worry about that shit anymore. things are so perilous that there will always be people desperate enough for anything no matter how shitty the conditions