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:
Can’t unionize if you don’t have the energy to fight.
Yep, you probably end up working with different groups of people too also making unionization harder.
Actually, that would make it even easier, in theory. You’d meet more of your coworkers and would be able to more easily spread the word and discuss pros/cons, etc.
How would you figure out who the plant is?
By not giving a shit. If they are spying on you, they are scared and you have all of the power.
No my guy, the hero doesn’t always win in the real world. This is where you get placed on PIP or start having performance issues, or get a promotion to a different team where there is a clash with your new manager.
Given any opportunity I will always be for a union but good damn if the cards aren’t stacked against unions.
That’s the difference between us. I’ve always found a way to get by and any work place or so called boss that wasn’t worthy of my time or energy, didn’t get that investment.
Maybe I was just raised different but I am more than willing to tell someone to fuck off if/when its needed, it of course starts more diplomatically than a literal middle finger but I was never afraid to escalate to an actual “fuck off, I’m out of here” when it was needed. It’s one reason why I work for myself, I only have myself and my bills to answer to.
There is a growing movement towards unions and other forms of collective bargaining. If you want to keep being afraid of your own shadow, that’s fine but don’t you dare do others the disservice of pushing them away from taking control of their own destinies.
Maybe
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.
Meaning they don’t have to worry about increasing wages or providing benefits for people who work there for longer.
I think part of the idea here is that people with options wouldn’t accept such an abusive schedule in the first place.
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.
those other 2 weeks you can live semi-normal and thus have friends.
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.
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
They can rotate my balls in and out of their mouth
Gottem
Lmao
Industrial engineer here. I have no fucking clue. It was theorized it might be better overall like 30 years ago, but by the time i graduated college it was understood that so long as you have management during changeovers so later shifts aren’t left confused or unsupervised you get all the real benefit of rotating shifts without the tremendous downside of all your workers being constantly off and pissed.
Also they should be providing later shifts with free healthy lunches and other incentives to keep them in good health to reduce the costs to their bodies of later shifts. Late shift operators need extra assistance because they’re living against society and circadian rhythms. Poor health also reduces performance so this isn’t what they should do because it’s right, it’s what they should do because if they don’t they’re always going to be frustrated at late shift performances
I’d hazard a guess that financial impacts of reduced performance as a result of this torturous schedule pale in comparison to the cost due to injuries.
I’ve recently had to work a couple of overnight shifts when I was overwise working basically dawn to dusk. Staying awake isn’t that hard. Getting real sleep becomes the struggle. What surprised me though was the vertigo, constant low grade nausea, and dizziness that disappeared after a normal full NIGHT’s rest. I may feel like a night owl sometimes, but my body does not agree.
Probably. But it’s an issue of variance. You will get the reduced performance. And if you get an injury you’re in a real bad spot, but an increase in likelihood of an abnormal event with disastrous consequences is far more abstract to businesses than something like a reduction in performance.
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This is why the field of actuarial science exists. I bet whomever is insuring these businesses would be interested in all of these management attitudes and business practices.
Because we havent had a general strike in a while
I don’t think this is intentionally evil, it’s simply most people don’t want to work the night shift, and they don’t want to pay extra for people to want to work the night shift, so they distribute the night shift load on a schedule. So everyone has a crappy night shift every couple weeks but no one person constantly has the night shift.
I’m sure if you volunteered, they give you the night shift every day if you want
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The dude defending this practice seems like the kind of guy that argues that minimum wage is bad because some business would go out of business.
Businesses that can’t function ethically shouldn’t stay in business. I don’t have much empathy for the business tyrants who punch with one hand while begging with the other
Minimum wage isn’t bad. I’m totally for it. It sets a level playing field for all businesses to compete.
If society agrees that this is the minimum, and the businesses that can’t sustain, they should go out of business.
I don’t have much empathy for the business tyrants
“Not much” is still infinitely more than you should have, which is none whatsofuckingever.
Sure. It’s an a****** thing to do. I agree
a******
I’m telling Mom that you cursed on the internet!
Yeah. My voice to text is very prudish
I think a lot of places in the world would call this intentionally evil. Literally forcing everyone to take part of the night shift or starve. That likely only works because people in that area have no choice. It’s intentionally evil.
I have to disagree. This is the same argument against running sweatshops. Everything is relevant in the local context of the people there.
Do people have a better option? If they did they would take it rather than a rotating shift schedule right?
If this is the best use of their time economically, how is it a bad thing how is it a net evil? Would it be better for the company just to not be there at all? Not providing any jobs?
the better option is not having a rotating shift, and compensating the employees that have to take third shift.
you’re seriously advocating for sweat shops? like the only options are abuse your employees or fail as a business? if that’s true, then your business should fail.
From an economic perspective many countries had to develop with sweatshop labor effectively until they built enough prosperity to develop other industries. But without that intermediate sweatshop stage, they couldn’t compete economically, couldn’t get the capital to modernize, and would be stuck in the agrarian phase
That’s really just a bureaucratic way of making it nobody’s fault.
We don’t need high enough profits to support sweatshops, no matter how “economical” you make the argument.
An “economic perspective” is horribly skewed in favor of the capitalist class; that’s just saying the misery of the commoner is justified by the greed of those who refuse to actually assist in producing any goods or value for society.
In the context of the United States, which I believe the original poster is talking about. There’s the classic rural problem of how do you keep them down on the farm. There’s many economic opportunities across the whole country, which allows freedom of movement, so people can emigrate to different parts of the country with more job opportunities and more lucrative uses of time.
So it’s not a dichotomy of work a rotating schedule or starve. There are other jobs in the area, they might be farm labor jobs, they may not pay as consistently, they may not pay as well, but there are economic opportunities in most rural areas. If those are insufficient, people have been known to move to the cities the urban areas where there’s more work opportunities.
This rotating shift opportunity, is just one of many available to people living in the United States. They’re not being forced into it. People are choosing it of their own free will.
If we would like to say rotating schedules should be illegal, great, let’s codify that into the labor laws. Vote on it. Then every business will have the same constraints.
Oh, for heavens sake. I chose to be born into a life where I can only choose the form of my exploitation, in other words?
No. It is not in any way shape or form a result of my choice that some business owner is prioritizing money over people.
Capitalism is not a neutral system. And it’s flaws are certainly not the fault of those being exploited.
So you feel the US is still in that intermediate sweatshop stage and that will go away if they could just get the capital to modernize?
Most of the service industry in the US is still in the sweatshop phase.
Some areas - yes. Developing a local economy is tricky, for places that don’t have historic concentration of logistics, there has to be a some attractive force to offset geographic conditions, and attract capital and employers to an area.
I’m all for providing alternative jobs to communities, a national Job corps, increasing military pay, or providing labor laws saying that rotating shift jobs are not allowed. Those are all fine. Giving people better options is the solution.
That would be fine if it weren’t fur subsidies keeping these businesses afloat on top of all that, while everyone has to make a net 10+% year over year for investors.
If you need all these handouts and to craft elaborate schemes where youre essentially taking time and money from employees and government to stay afloat, yeah best the business not be there at all. People will start solving the problem differently. i.e don’t spend a billion dollars keeping a business in your town afloat, spend a billion dollars educating the population and giving them new skills. Capitalism doesn’t work that way though.
If this is evil then any company offering a job is evil. I offer you a job working from 9am-5pm. You have a certain schedule such thaf you cannot meet those terms. I am evil because you have no choice but to work for me or starve.
See what I mean? And sure, capitalism is exploitative. But I don’t see how this specific arrangement is any more or less exploitative than any other.
Factories need workers around the clock because it is expensive to start and stop operations. So you develop strategies in order to keep everyone happy.
Sort of like how oil rigs or deep sea fishing does the x months work y months home thing. Work for 3 months, take off for 1. Etc.
This is exactly why. A shutdown/startup is not just inconvenient. In many factories, it can cost them a huge chunk of money. It’s more than just lost time and income. There are costly procedures in the mix. There are strict quotas and contracts to meet with customers. A factory that shuts down every night is not efficient or sustainable.
I’m very pro-worker and anti-boss, but it’s naive to expect factories to not have a night shift.
Long term it will be robots doing most of it, anyway.
To quote @jpreston2005 “the better option is not having a rotating shift, and compensating the employees that have to take third shift”
Sounds pretty evil to me.
I’m sure if you volunteered, they give you the night shift every day if you want
Not in my case. In the part of the interview where they got to the rotating schedule I asked if I could just do graveyard and they refused. Said they wanted to have management work with all employees or some bullshit. I think they were using it to get around overtime though.
And its still evil to push the rotating schedule bullshit on your employees to get out of premium pay.
I don’t think this is intentionally evil
and they don’t want to pay extra for people to want to work the night shift
You realize these are contradictory statements, right? If they don’t want to pay more, that is evil!
I’m not sure it’s a universal law that not paying extra money makes somebody evil.
You don’t think there’s a problem with equal pay for unequal work?
Yeah this isn’t just blue collar jobs.
I have an acquaintance that is an ICU doc who makes huge cash. They choose an every other week rotation days/nights for the premium night pay.
They also say their colleagues don’t want to work nights all the time so their group prefers this lifestyle.
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Having worked that specific kind of rotating shift, you still get the shift differential (a whole 25 cents for 2nd and 50 for 3rd, wooooo). That was also with a (neutered) union.
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It was probably more for better paid positions, but after three years sitting at the bottom I got kind of sick of the shifts and being treated like shit.
I work in an office now… still sucks, but at least I get to sleep overnight.
What I have gathered after seeing threads like this pop up on Reddit periodically over about 11 years, and most of the responses here, is…
Fuck if there’s a reason.
No, seriously. Pretty sure it’s become standard and as Capitalism and Management do, they follow whatever bullshit tradition exists.
That said, I personally have always felt factory and retail work fuck with schedules so much because it maintains control and limits sociability outside of work and work groups. Thus increasing retention by artificially creating social nodes we feel a part of and/or do not want to be removed from. Likely created by the same people who cut pensions and created things like Mining Towns.
Without knowing anything about the situation, my guess is that if you run a static 1st, 2nd, 3rd shift style rotation, you can pay market rate for 1st and 2nd shift, but you have to pay a premium for 3rd shift due to it being a less desirable shift for the general public.
With rotating shifts you just hire people and make them work the graveyard shift for no additional money, and get to argue with those that have to work it as “look, no one wants to work 3rd shift. That’s why we rotate it between everyone on. We’re a team here. We all pull our own weight”. Which is a bad faith argument, but they’ll happily use it on you and frame you as the over demanding worker, instead of the underpaid worker.
This is it. If they’re not technically third shift, they don’t have to be paid a shift differential.
They can claim everyone is “normal thing, payroll-wise” and the fact that a full third (or 2/3) of the work they do is “outside of normal” can be classified as “as needed” and “occasional other shifts as required”.
It allows them to be one thing on the books while being completely different in practice.
Most people only choose swing or graveyard with a differential. Rotating allows employers to fill shifts without offering differentials.
I used to work nights and got a differential. I would have been significantly less complacent without one.
From google:
A differential in scheduling is additional compensation for hours worked outside of the standard schedule or at untraditional times, such as nights, weekends, or holidays
This means that since you’ve got shifts at all hours of the clock, there are no “untraditional hours” for you, hence no differential compensation.
Thanks Mr Technicality! Its pretty clear OP was saying they got paid a premium over their coworkers that did the same role as OP but during non night shift hours, and had they not gotten that premium, they wouldnt have been as ok with nightshift hours
tradition in this context is not “what you’re company typically does” it’s “what society typically does”. that’s why they’re considered untraditional. because you have to exist when the rest of the world is asleep and that makes many things hard to do.
Because you’re not expected to have a home life that takes precedence over work anymore.
Rotating shifts sacrifice the employees everything to reduce staffing and training costs.
Sounds like they had to do that to keep the night shift people from quitting. Probably not a place to go work lol.
Are they just trying to destroy your soul and your health?
Yes,
But likely for a very stupid reason like 50 years ago some consultant had to give a plan to increase efficiency but forgot until the night before.
I think the big issue is that the rotation is every week. Every other week or more would be better.
In a strong union environment, this would likely get addressed with a combination of higher pay and seniority. Senior people choose their shifts and if junior members have to work night shifts, at least they get compensated.
Compensation and the piece of mind that they will get the prime shifts when they have earned the seniority. AKA there’s a goal to be had for suffering though a difficult situation. Otherwise hopelessness is a nightmare.
Every three months would be great
It’s because there aren’t enough unions in this godforsaken country.
French here, we got plenty unions and still a shit ton of jobs working the exact same way.
German here. Here rotating shifts in assembly, jobs is quite regular. We also have unions for the big industries that do rotating shifts.
Is it rotating weekly? If this is so common then what is the benefit of this? Like surely just keeping your employees constantly confused/off balance during their shift isn’t good
I had a job that rotated, but it was quarterly, and it was so nobody got “stuck” on nights/days.
The Job description OP posted is weekly rotating shifts. Quarterly rotating g shifts is a good way to prevent getting stuck in one shift without destroying your employees.
Maybe the problem is who owns the companies
I used to work at a place with 3 shifts, and they rotated them because everyone wanted 1st shift rather than 2nd and 3rd. I chose to stay on 2nd because it paid a bit more and I don’t like getting up early. It would have been hell to switch every single week!
We switched every 2 weeks. Your sleep never adapted.
We did it monthly, if I recall. I rarely worked another shift, but when I did it was awful. I adapt VERY slowly to sleep schedule changes.
