Scheduling Workers For Maximum Efficiency

~ Laura

Businesses have learned how to track the times when their workers are most needed — when delivery trucks arrive or during the lunch time crunch. Now they expect the workers to work those hours and only those hours. The hours change from week to week and rarely conform to school or daycare schedules. It’s a big money saver for businesses, but it wrecks havoc on the workers, especially those with small children.

Flex-time used to be a pro-work/family term. Now, it’s a force for evil. More here.

Like increasing numbers of low-income mothers and fathers, Ms. Navarro is at the center of a new collision that pits sophisticated workplace technology against some fundamental requirements of parenting, with particularly harsh consequences for poor single mothers. Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing. Managers are often compensated based on the efficiency of their staffing.

Scheduling is now a powerful tool to bolster profits, allowing businesses to cut labor costs with a few keystrokes. “It’s like magic,” said Charles DeWitt, vice president for business development at Kronos, which supplies the software for Starbucks and many other chains.

Yet those advances are injecting turbulence into parents’ routines and personal relationships, undermining efforts to expand preschool access, driving some mothers out of the work force and redistributing some of the uncertainty of doing business from corporations to families, say parents, child care providers and policy experts.

Published by Laura

18 thoughts on “Scheduling Workers For Maximum Efficiency”

  1. Time to change the laws, then. Something like, if you’re not given a set schedule at least a week in advance, then you’re considered “on call” for that whole week and they have to pay you for 40 hours (or more-do techs on call get paid extra for the weekend?).

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    1. I think you’d also need something to account for split shifts. That is, you can’t make somebody work for four hours clock out for one and clock back in for four to avoid overtime.

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  2. State laws differ widely in how overtime is calculated. One way to handle split shifts would be to count number of hours worked in an arbitrary 24-hour period (midnight to midnight, for example) instead of consecutive hours worked. I’m in a union and our contract has a similar provision about swapping overtime for personal time at straight rates if taken in the same week (defined as midnight Sunday to midnight Sunday). So there’s historical examples of this arrangement being legally approved and workable.

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  3. When you go for your lunchtime sub sandwich, it’s prepared quickly by someone who got there at 11, or who wasn’t called in if the weather forecast was crappy and the owner knew from experience that the lunchtime crowd would be small. There are big gains for the owner, and moderate gains for the customer. Is there a good way to safeguard the employee?
    We keep seeing breathless news about the burger machines, 300-burgers-an-hour-and-it-never-calls-in-sick-nor-has-kids-who-need-to-go-to-court. Maybe the owner switches to the burger machine and the high-labor bacon-avocado-tomato-mayo sandwich vanishes off the menu, and the person who woulda made the BATMs (yum, BATMs) doesn’t get a job after all.
    Many of the things I think of to make the lot of shift and part-shift workers better are sort of Norway strategies, and would push us towards Norway price levels. I can pay those prices, if I have to, probably lose some weight, too. The person whose job and pay get better under Norway rules has an improved work life. The person who doesn’t get a job because s/he is not worth paying Norway wages is a loser.

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  4. Many of the things I think of to make the lot of shift and part-shift workers better are sort of Norway strategies, and would push us towards Norway price levels. I can pay those prices, if I have to, probably lose some weight, too. The person whose job and pay get better under Norway rules has an improved work life. The person who doesn’t get a job because s/he is not worth paying Norway wages is a loser.

    Setting aside that burger machines don’t purchase burgers, what do you think is going to happen when the majority of the population (the 70% that does not have a college degree) is considered superfluous? Our labor “not worth paying Norway wages”?

    See, this is something I hear a lot from rich folks—that “we” (meaning society, as a matter of economic policy) shouldn’t pay a living wage because the labor itself is not worth that much. But at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, there is no limit to what the labor itself is worth—CEOs are rewarded handsomely for losing money for their company. It’s all in who makes the decision.

    The economy isn’t ecology. Human beings make these decisions, not the cosmos. The real question of value is whose lives are valued. It isn’t about the burger. Come to think of it, which jobs are valued the least? If you guessed “jobs traditionally held by women”—ding! ding! ding!—you are a winner! And again, it’s about whose lives are valued. Robots to care for toddlers, robots to care for your grandma—after all, they never call in sick, or have sick children, or lives that matter.

    Is there a good way to safeguard the employee?

    Of course there is. At one time, pollution control was thought to be economically destructive—dumping toxic waste into the drinking water supply was the American Way…burning rivers indicated economic growth and all that. Welp, “just-in-time” scheduling is as destructive to human lives, human families as the toxic waste that permeated our lives growing up in the seventies. (not like pollution doesn’t exist anymore, but it really has gotten a lot better).

    But the best way to safeguard employees is strong labor unions. US culture does not value the lives of working people—USian culture considers one’s human worth to be directly proportional to one’s net worth. The only way for people without net worth to counter that is to come together in numbers.

    “Just in time” scheduling exists because the lives of those workers are not valued, and the lives of their families are not valued. There are solutions. Your only decision will be whether you want those solutions to be peaceful or not.

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    1. What she said. Plus, I’ve never in my entire life seen anybody mention a burger machine. Having worked in McDonald’s, even 25 years ago, they were already committed to automating everything they could. And to split shifts, except they didn’t give them out to experienced people because everybody who got them very often quit.

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    2. “The economy isn’t ecology” – yes to this.

      On a related note, why do we have a business section in the newspaper and not a family section? Or if there is a family section, why is the business section one of the largest? Not because that’s written in stone or some “truth” that was uncovered – just because that’s what’s valued. The Dow hitting 10,000 over the day-to-day life of workers.

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  6. We had two teens working this summer and we got a taste of ‘just in time’ scheduling. We managed to have dinner together about 4 times –someone was always getting called in. Yup, 5 people and 4 jobs, not exactly a recipe for family life. Gave me a lot more sympathy for how this works for parents — I can’t even imagine it.

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    1. A reason why I’m not seeing why I should encourage my child to take that kind of job, if alternatives are available, even though I think working for pay is a valuable skill.

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      2. Indeed, I understand that this is one of my family’s privileges, that my children do have alternatives, since in our case, earning the money is not the goal. I also understand that the differing ability to make these choices exacerbates differences between the “working class” (whatever definition that includes) and whatever we are (which I would not pretend to be “working class” by any definition).

        I was responding to the concept that kids who don’t need the money should be working at these jobs, in order to learn the skills (and mindset) associated with working for pay, which, unfortunately, seems to include being treated as utilitarian objects and not people. I do worry that the courage and compassion (if not the power) to fight such treatment (not just for themselves, but for others) can only be earned through having done the work, hence my ambivalence. But, my hope is to teach my kids the courage and compassion to fight against the treatment, even if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

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  7. And, the NY Times article on “independent” workers: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/jobs/independent-workers-are-here-to-stay.html?_r=0 I think the key is thinking of how to tip the scales to help workers with the asymmetry in power. I think we’re seeing a growing trend to centralizing the economic value in the broker (and, a broker who argues that they are merely a conduit connecting people to resources, and thus have no obligations to either the buyer or the seller, of goods or labor). Amazon, for books, Google for information, Uber/Lyft etc for transportation, eBay, Etsy, Favor, Taskrabbit, Mechanical Turk, 99Design, . . . . They are good ideas, but not if they undermine labor to the point where most labor is nearly valueless. Society can’t survive under that condition, unless we go back to some form of society where most people are virtually slaves.

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  8. I immediately recognized this schedule problem in 2004 at my first “post-college” hourly-job for a major corporation. I “clopened” all the time because I had open availability. It was the only way I could afford a car. I lived at home and could barely afford my own groceries, and after my car payment, student loans, and health insurance, I had less than $200 left to buy clothes/food. I had to get a car because I couldn’t rely on public transportation to get me to job interviews sandwiched between crazy shifts. Although, I can understand from security standpoint why a company would not want workers doing the same shift all the time. It’s makes a business more vulnerable to theft, “giving free product to regulars” and other crimes. (There are other ways to solve these issues).

    The erratic schedule would not let me take more community college classes to supplement my bachelors degree. So finally I had to cut back my availability when I registered for one and sure enough, my hours were cut. I finally quit the corporate hourly job, went to graduate school and ultimately failed.

    All of my previous jobs were in the entertainment or construction industry through family/friends during high school and college. The schedule issue in my post-college job was the biggest shock. I was one of the first kids in my family to go to college and my parents thought that shipping me off to school would be enough to launch a functioning adult. They did the best they could and I don’t regret doing getting my degree for one bit. It certainly was not the panacea to solve all of my problems, though.

    The sum total of my parent’s poor choices and my poor choices as a teenager/ young adult is that I am a better human being who appreciates humanity and hard work. Ultimately, it was the college degree that prevented me from fulfilling my family’s young motherhood legacy, and becoming a completely xenophobic racist. With this string of jobs in retail, education, law-enforcement, and direct care work with the disabled, all in my own community, I understand real power and privilege now. Many of my peers from high school have moved on and became very successful, but staying close to the nest has given me wider view of the world and what it really means to struggle and be human.

    My car is 10 years old and I still live at home. Hopefully my car lasts another 10 years and within that time I can use that “lack of a car payment and rent payment” extra money to save up and get my own place, and better education to get out of this house.

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