It’s safe to say that working long hours (>8, but especially >12) is unhealthy and detrimental to the workers’ efficiency. Why do many employers still make their employees work in such long shifts? Medical Doctors and security guards come to my mind straight away. Why not just rotate 3 people within the day to cover it with 8 hour shifts, so that you have rested employees who perform better and make fewer mistakes? Especially since employers usually pay extra for the long shifts and can’t have that employee come in again for 24 or even 48 hours. Someone please shed some light on this…
In: 6
Paramedic here so I’m sure it varies by profession, but here it’s simply a numbers game my friend.
We’re short staffed and it’s hard to train new people. Let alone attract them to the career. Leads to long hours, few days off and tired but professional and experienced workers.
Less people you have to staff. Most times it’s cheaper to pay overtime than pay another salary, medical, retirement.
The short answer is that companies, under capitalism, are basically just evil Excel spreadsheets, and they don’t view their employees as living, breathing, suffering human beings. Workers are just the means to their profit, so they will work us as hard and as long as they can. I used to pull 12 hour shifts packing boxes, among other jobs that didn’t give a shit about my struggling.
In many cases it’s a question of problems associated with handover between shifts vs problems associated with longer shifts. Even with good note taking, handover attempts pretty much always miss something. In IT environments that I’m more familiar with, this means repetition of troubleshooting steps and general extension of outages.In medical fields, it can lead to further medical complications or death. So it becomes a matter of finding out where the dangers of handover failures get outweighed by the dangers of fatigue.
For other professions, it can sometimes be a matter of trying to min/max shift hours. If you want two people on shift at all times, but not more if you can help it, and you need coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and want to give everyone 40 hours but not more, what kinds of funky shifts do you start needing?
Heard straight from several corporate VP’s mouths… “Overtime is cheaper than benefits.”
That’s it.
It’s cheaper to work you to death than it is to staff to 8 hour shifts.
Overtime is cheaper than funding a second employee’s social security, 401K or pension, healthcare premiums, unemployment insurance, and personal time.
Garbage man here – anyone operating a vehicle for long period obviously it’s not healthy and eventually becomes dangerous. However, if I’m in one county and my drivers route is in a whole other county, I can’t really afford to have him drive all the way back to home base to trade drivers. Meanwhile another trash truck might be in a third county collecting trash, so I can’t reasonably send a smaller vehicle to take the ‘second shift’ out to meet the trash trucks either. If I’m going to make it to the end of my route and get to the landfill on time with all 5 trucks, the only option I have is to make it 14 hour days. Unless you can buy me another 5 trucks or so and find people with Commercial Drivers Licenses willing to operate them, in which case I’d be happy to give you my left nut.
My husband is a contractor, there is often a lot of time spent on travel to jobsite and setting up equipment. You don’t want to do an 8 hour shift and spend only 4 hours building. You want to get the max project hours out of your effort, so you do a 10 hour shift (or more).
Sometimes you have to figure in setup/takedown times. A welder might spend an hour each day not being directly productive. Four ten hour days results in more total productive hours than five eight hour days even though the same number of hours were worked.
My old job requires working in other states, out of a hotel room. Food, travel and lodging were paid for by the client. So you’d work as long of days as possible, without days off. It was to both the client and employees benefit.
As an employee, you get home sooner. The bonus was overtime pay. As a client, you paid less for associated costs of labor.
The kicker is when you come home and they send you right back out to another job. 3 weeks straight was about my max before my mind and body started producing negative returns.
Latest Answers