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.
@crazy-pages Exactly. After 10 years on retail literally that is the only reason and to also prevent labor organizing (unionizing) they also introduced in many of the companies I worked with changing some people from one store to the other. They did that to any person who was well regarded by their coworkers. Or any person who sounded too well informed about the rules and how the managers kept disregarding them (I was the second case I think).
While I was working for a retail portuguese brand (I won't say names) for a year I was moved from store to store the last 6 months of my contract and I was the only person who knew well the rules of my country for that sector and kept informing my coworkers about them and that just in itself was a problem.
What they look for is the feeling of insecurity so it is easier to make you compete with your coworkers instead of organizing. So yeah, all oof this 'absurd random choices' are not in fact put there illogically but to make organizing and unionizing a very difficult task.
