• grinning_serpent@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    There’s also a real limit to how many staff a given schedule can support. You don’t hire people that don’t have any work that they’re needed to perform.

    Put yourself in the shoes of that example person. You were hired but as long as everyone else is healthy and functional, you’re always superfluous. Your hours will be cut repeatedly to avoid wasting labor costs, but you’ll still be expected to be available. If you’re instead on call, you will be expected to be available for all days you agreed to be on call for - you can’t work a different job or get wrapped up in personal things that you can’t set down or pause.

    There’s a difference between a full staff and a skeleton crew staff. But in both cases, a sudden unplanned absence like illness or injury will require someone to work extra hours or the business will have to do without that person. A fully staffed property, like a hotel for example, might have two desk agents that typically work together for the same shift to ensure customers never have to wait too long for service. The job can be done with just one person, at cost of customer experience, and that’s what you’ll see from places running a skeleton crew.

    What you won’t see, however, is there being a third staff member who is there purely to cover for one of the other two. That’s already handled by the supervisor (if one exists) or manager.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      In those cases they’re supposed to hire the full staff and schedule them all. Scheduling only the bare minimum of people every day is a recent phenomenon.

          • grinning_serpent@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            I literally explained it to you in the post you originally replied to.

            A fully staffed property doesn’t mean that they can cover unplanned absences without either someone else taking on extra hours or less work being done.

            You don’t hire people that you don’t need, and I provided real world examples of why few people would ever want to be hired as a “just in case” staff member.

            I didn’t think it was that complicated. What needs to be further explained?

            • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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              4 days ago

              In the 1990s and 2000s, employers would just have more people show up than needed most days. We used to have “easy” days sometimes when there was more employees than work.

              The whole calling people on their day off thing used to be rare, and it’s absurd that saying no is now counted against you. What we consider fully staffed today has shifted considerably.

              • grinning_serpent@lemmy.world
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                4 days ago

                Yeah. Being stuck at work, nothing to do, just waiting for the time to clock out and go home.

                It’s fucking miserable. Those days suck. You get to think of all the shit you’d rather be doing than staring at walls or lazily scrubbing floors you already scrubbed twice already just to look busy. It’s shitty for staff morale and it’s even worse for budget efficiency. No one likes feeling unimportant or unneeded.

                And besides, how the fuck you think a company is gonna survive if it’s wasting money on unnecessary staff? Even with a redistribution of wealth from the worthless c-suite back down to people who work for a living, the company still has to be profitable in order to be able to pay those wages and salaries, in order to be able to increase those wages and salaries for cost of living and inflation and merit based raises.

                You don’t become profitable by wasting money.

                • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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                  4 days ago

                  They would have you do cleaning and stuff, and just do less cleaning on the busy days. Or they’d have you watch the mandatory annual safety videos.

                  It was their problem, not your problem.

                  I’m still bored at work occasionally to this day, but I’d rather that than have today’s poor boundaries on my “days off”. Your whole day can be shot de facto on call with no compensation.

                  • grinning_serpent@lemmy.world
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                    4 days ago

                    Yeah I’m not saying that’s better. I never defended that stupid shit. I’m pointing out there’s a lot of Reddit bullshit flying around this post by people that have more than likely either never been in a proper management position or who were absolutely godawful at it when given the opportunity.

                    You think people are happy doing busywork? They’re not. People fucking despise it.