it always just blows my mind how foreign of a concept "a permanent weekly schedule" is in food service/retail/etc jobs, despite being the obviously best way to do scheduling
literally our parent company cannot comprehend that all our stores schedule this way and have no intention of changing because its the best
they were so adamant about "you HAVE to make a new schedule every week" that our director of ops basically had to say "just send me you permanent schedule every week and I'll say you're doing it"
which worked a little too well apparently because now they're giving us a new software to post our "weekly" schedules to so all employees can know when they're supposed to work. despite the fact that. they already know when they're supposed to work. because the schedule doesn't change.
and i really do mean it's the best way because from the employees side:
always know when you're scheduled because it's the same every week
easy to track your hours because they're the same every week
don't need to worry about being scheduled when you're not available because it's the fucking same every week
easier to get time off and shifts covered in advance because you always know what days you'd need off ahead of time
easier to schedule around school
easier to have a second job since your availability here won't change
if you need to change your schedule you can just talk to one of the managers ahead of time
and from the management side:
pretty much all of the above makes our lives easier
always know how many people you have working
so we generally know ahead of time if we're gonna be short staffed and need to ask for extra help
we know if we should start hiring again/how many people we need to hire based on how many shifts are open on the schedule
also, it's strongly incentivized not to run low on staff since we have to be in the stores running them all the time, so if we're short it fucking sucks for us too
and, since we're in the store all the time, we can tell which shifts don't need any more people too
and despite how many times we explained this to the higher-ups at Inspire they just. don't fucking get it. and keep finding new ways to waste our time pretending to run our stores the way the want. it's actually infuriating.
It's because inconsistent staggered schedules are useful for preventing labor organizing.
So just like. In case anyone is wondering. The benefits of inconsistent schedules to management and corporate are:
With inconsistent schedules, it's harder for employees to coordinate and communicate grievances against the company.
With inconsistent schedules, it's difficult for employees to make time to apply for and interview for other jobs, which means they are more dependent on staying at this job, which means they have less to negotiate with when there's a problem (such as wage theft or, indeed, inconsistent scheduling).
With inconsistent schedules, it's also difficult for employees to hold multiple jobs, because of the possibility of overlap leading to issues at one or both jobs.
With inconsistent schedules, they can make sure that they don't need to have people to cover every possible shift; they can thus underhire and have the current employees do the work of multiple people while stretched across the active hours of the business.
With inconsistent schedules, they make it difficult or impossible for employees to plan time off or use sick days (if they even offer them), because there's no easy way to predict and plan around these days. You cannot plan a three day trip if you don't know what days you'll be off.
With inconsistent schedules, employees are more likely to have bad work/life balance, which disrupts their ability to organize against capital.
With inconsistent schedules, the workplace can also short employees on hours whenever possible without disrupting an established status quo.
With inconsistent schedules, they can create an expectation that every employee is "on-call" 24/7, without having them actually be on-call (because if you're on-call in a white collar job, you're meant to be paid for that time). If no one's schedule is concrete, then any scheduling choice by management is justified regardless of inconvenience to the worker.
In summary: keeping hours inconsistent and unreliable creates an atmosphere of desperation and insecurity in the workforce, allowing the workers' labor to be exploited more efficiently. It doesn't matter if it's less profitable or makes the business run worse, because to a capitalist, any amount of money spent on keeping workers in line is going to still come out to less money/power/influence they gain from having far more control over their workforce.
To people with power, control over the hierarchy of society is worth far more than money.
