In which full availability is stupid and bad for everybody.

When I worked at a 7-Eleven in my 20’s, there were shifts. There were day people, swing people, and graveyard people. Everybody had a regular schedule — you didn’t work the same days every week, but you worked the same shift every day, the shift you were hired to do. Sure, I worked the occasional day or graveyard shift, but they were rare.

Last night I checked the internets for more info about today’s interview and found their unclaimed Facebook page, on which I learned that some poor chick last year worked Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year, and that her ‘occasional overnights’ were weekly.

When you’re open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, WHY WOULDN’T YOU SCHEDULE SHIFTS?

What the fuck is the point, I wonder, of having an entire workforce with random eating times, random sleeping times, and no scheduling security? What the fuck is the point, I ask you, of having an entire workforce with permanent jetlag?

How is this good for workforce or employer?

It’s not. It’s stupid.

One can guess how it got this way. Maybe managers, who weren’t getting raises fast enough to keep up with the cost of living, got tired of having to cover shifts left uncovered due to emergency, illness, or quits. They weren’t getting paid enough for that shit, so they started letting new hires know that they’d need to be available to come in at any time. As the economy worsened, this full-availability bullshit became the norm because people accepted these horrific terms in order to get jobs. After all, how many off-shifts would you really end up working in a year?

Or maybe it happened some other way. Maybe workers in the 80’s bargained away schedule stability in order to have the opportunity to earn, earn, earn. I have no idea. All I know is that during my decades in the workforce, non-office employers’ expectations have changed drastically and to the detriment of the workforce.

By income level, the lowest income workers face the most irregular work schedules.

My last employer told me that chaotic, shift-free scheduling was “fair,” meaning that everybody had equally shitty schedules, but this approach to scheduling human resources guarantees late arrivals and no-shows from your workforce. Because people do not do well in a state of perpetual jetlag, at some point they’re going to sleep in—or sleep through a shift, or just call in sick—because their bodies will have had it.

People, as a rule, perform better when on a routine. Back when there was still a graveyard shift, people I knew who worked it claimed they were night people and that grave suited them perfectly. Not everybody wants to work day shift. Swing and grave were how students managed to work full- or nearly-full-time to pay for college. It was how the enterprising could have two jobs and some small quality of life.

When you google ‘shift work’ now, it no longer means people who work regular but non-standard hours; it means people who work utterly random schedules. A week of days followed by a week of nights, or a schedule that includes both in the same week. Crazy, awful shit. Those people (nurses, television producers) probably do it because it pays. That’s their choice.

It shouldn’t be the norm for entry-level jobs, and yet it is. Spend an hour digging through job listings and you’ll find that random scheduling is the norm for nearly all non-office positions.

There are your employed elite, with their chairs and climate control and regular 8-5 schedules and holidays off, and then there’s damn near everybody else, who have none of those perqs and earn half as much to boot.

Among service workers, production workers, and skilled trades, most employees know their schedule only one week or less in advance.

Say you run a Starbucks or a Home Depot. You’re open the same hours every day, 363 days a year. Why on earth would you change the schedule, randomly, every week? There’s no way all your employees need special schedule changes every single day of the year; you’re using Kronos or some other horrific software to generate random scheduling for no reason.

This is damaging your workforce and therefore your ability to perform well as a business.

Plus it’s just a dick move. Your people can’t schedule family or social events; are constantly struggling with childcare and transportation; are constantly suffering fatigue.

Plus, really, you greedy fucks, is your fear of having to pay a little bit of overtime every once in awhile really balanced against institutional “no full-time employee” mandates? Is the pittance (compared to corporate profits) you’d have to spend on health insurance for full-time employees really worth handicapping nearly your entire workforce with income insecurity, schedule insecurity, fatigue, and more?

Probit analysis suggests that the likelihood of being usually part-time but actually working 35 or more hours is enhanced by being white, female, not married, enrolled as a college student, not in a union, having a four-year college degree, and being employed in one of the following occupations: handlers/laborers, machine operators, private household work, sales, services and protective services, and not self-employed.

That is to say, all the women (many grandmothers) working the front end at my last job. Endless overtime due to quits due to over- or under-scheduling and low pay, issues the employer could choose to mitigate but didn’t, because it had grandmothers in its workforce to exploit. Oh, damn, the new girl quit without notice because the job sucks and so-and-so is out on maternity leave and we really need you to stay a few extra hours, just so everyone can get a lunch break is not something women find it easy to say no to.

Retail sucks so much, in fact, that there’s this. And no, they’re not asking for handouts; they’re just hoping to be less exploited. Exploitation sounds like such a strong word, but what else is it when corporations do literally everything in their power to withhold even the most basic courtesies to the employees with whom they’re in symbiotic relationship?

So much of what sucks about working retail and similar jobs is needless, and some of what sucks about working retail is due to corporations deliberately exploiting the workforce because nobody’s telling them they can’t. Paid sick days should just be a thing because it’s moral and correct. As should regular scheduling. A living wage. A moderate expectation of the number of hours you want and job security.

For the poor, work is broken.