Target is evil.
Let me elaborate: hours, post-holiday rush, dropped.
But instead of putting us on three or four 8-hour shifts a week (which is what they said would happen) corporate decided they’d give each of us 5 or 6. 4-hour shifts a week instead. One of the managers let slip (though this is the good one so idk if it was deliberate) that it’s to let people extend shifts to cover if people call out.
It’s essentially using lean staffing tactics to keep part timers working almost full time hours. That made me angry, for obvious reasons, but also afraid, when I saw it, and it just clicked why afraid.
Here’s the thing: the CEO of target studies military theory as a hobby. He’s said as much in interviews about places he looks to dos ideas on resource management. When I remembered that, I realized what the scheduling reminded me of.
This, to me, looks a lot like a staff/scheduling equivalent reticulan (netlike) reserve deployment - when you spread out units, each with a reserve force, so that if any given unit is wiped out or routed, you can deploy a nearby unit’s reserve to plug the gap.
There’s been a lot of call-ours lately and Covid keeps spiking. And you only use a reticulan reserve deployment with a 40-50% reserve when you’re anticipating 15-30% casualties and need to be able to push on regardless.
This is after they didn’t enforce capacity restrictions at all during the holiday rush. They’re anticipating 15-30% of us being killed or incapacitated by Covid and they’ve set it up to work our coworkers double to cover the slack. And they’re not the only ones doing that.
If you’ve been seeing a bunch of 4-hour shifts on your schedule and you’re part time, now you know why.
I want this shit spread like wildfire. Reblog it. I want to radicalize as many people as we can with this.
