#lean staffing

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.

-The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels

[a-really-big-cat]

In this post I would like to talk about another term that claims to be lean: lean staffing. It is NOT lean! It is an abomination. It is pret

I was interested to read here that lean staffing is, according to this writer, not a proper or intended implementation of "lean manufacturing", but is rather a perversion or corruption of the original idea. Before this I had no clue that lean was a broader concept than deliberate understaffing, let alone contrary to it.

Lean manufacturing as a methodology is reportedly focused on eliminating waste in operations, and does have a link with being short-staffed, but (as is claimed) only in the sense of being an important tool for weathering out periods of worker shortages, not in the sense of prescribing worker shortages: https://ciftinnovation.org/manufacturing/3-benefits-of-implementing-lean-into-your-manufacturing-production-a-blog-series/. The idea being that if you are understaffed, then it's important to reorganize your workplace and prioritize things that actually add value for the customer. In my novice analysis, I think what has happened in our modern economy is that many executives learned about this lean manufacturing concept, then (stupidly) thought to themselves "hey, why do I need adequate staffing in the first place if I can use these methods to deal with understaffing? I'm such a business genius; there's no way this will backfire!"

I think it's weird that a) Wikipedia has several articles on topics related to lean manufacturing, yet doesn't have an article on lean staffing and b) that there isn't more research and scholarship on lean staffing and how it relates to or differs from lean manufacturing.

[deathtoskinnyjeans]

A Twitter Thread About Short Staffing aka Lean Staffing

[squidificati0n]

[rotationalsymmetry]

Capitalism vs Getting Things Done

I remember reading one time an article about fast food workers talking about not getting adequate first aid treatment for burns while on the job. Yesterday I cut my finger chopping up apples. When I was heavily involved in Food Not Bombs, this sort of thing happened all the time -- small cuts, small burns, one time tripping and spraining both wrists, which put me out of commission for about two months. (I was relying heavily on my parents at the time for things like medical expenses; I'm not sure how I would have managed otherwise tbh. Conceptually I like Food Not Bombs, but housing and health care are actually much bigger deals than food, in terms of how to get basic survival needs taken care of outside of the system. Whether you're outside of it on purpose or involuntarily.) What I'm trying to say is: when I'd get burned, I'd take a break from working as long as I needed to to get the burn cooled down, like a normal human being who's interacting with other normal human beings. And generally this was very effective in keeping those burns minor -- the heat can keep doing damage for some time after the initial injury, so cooling it down and staying away from the stove for a while is actually really important. This really should be how it is everywhere. But in order to do that, you either have to be willing to do less work some of the time and not get everything done, and/or have more people doing the work than you strictly speaking need if everything goes right. (With Food Not Bombs, it's volunteer run, and sometimes you've got plenty of people and sometimes you don't.) Fast food places aren't willing to do that, it cuts into profits. They do lean staffing, where you have the absolute bare minimum of employees you need to do the job if everyone is working hard and no one is sick or injured and everything goes right, all of the time. This is not necessary or helpful from a perspective of getting the job done, in this case feeding people. It is only necessary from a perspective of maximizing profits. You know what else isn't necessary for getting the job done? Most of the boss/employee dynamic. As in: generally you are going to want someone who's got a big-picture plan and is telling other people where they fit in the plan. That is generally a load-bearing aspect of getting things done with multiple people. In order to have a Food Not Bombs cookhouse, you have someone who promises that it's going to happen every week, called the bottom-liner, and in practice the bottom-liner is also often the "boss" in the sense of "hey, we need someone to make a salad dressing" and "hey, who's doing the bagel pick-up next week?" and so on. But generally not the boss in terms of telling people "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" or what have you, in terms of forcing people to work. People are there voluntarily. And the bar for kicking out a volunteer is a heck of a lot lower for kicking out someone you're paying -- so anyone who shows up gets to make their own call on what their work to leisure ratio should look like, what sorts of heavy lifting their back can't handle, how often they need to use the bathroom, etc. And the meals still get done. (Granted: in my experience there's not much of a mechanism for being held accountable by the community being served, except to the extent that the community being served and the volunteer workers overlap to some degree. And as Food Not Bombs tends to hardcore refuse any sort of asking for legal permission, there's also no health and safety type audits from the government, which means it's solely on the volunteers to actually keep things safe, which can be a hit or miss proposition.) I can certainly imagine that if everything ran that way there'd be a lot of situations where you need a higher level of commitment than "sure, show up whenever and do what you feel like." (I've had volunteer positions that required a higher level of commitment than "sure, show up whenever and do what you feel like.") So I don't think evaluation and feedback on how you're doing, including "yeah we

don't want you to keep doing this" if it goes badly enough, is an unnecessary part of the "boss/employee" or equivalent dynamic. And there are some situations where there's an inherent reason to not just go to the bathroom whenever. But, that's the point: there's a difference between there being an inherent need demanded by the nature of the job itself, vs a created need that's only there as a power trip. I think being in that environment for a while fundamentally changed the way I interact with the world, for the better. I learned to see things primarily in terms of "the things that need to get done, are they getting done, and if not how are we going to deal with that?" rather than things like "how do I look to the person in charge?" When I went back to school, I noticed that my peers were a lot more likely to be conscious of how they looked to the professors -- for instance, if we were doing a class presentation as a group, I didn't mind doing relatively more of the behind the scenes work and relatively little of the actual speaking in class work. I attributed the difference to my being older and having more work experience than many of my classmates. But... maybe it wasn't paid-employment experience. I didn't generally have the sorts of paid jobs where I had control over how work was divided among a team, that only happened in non-paid contexts. Food Not Bombs. And other (not necessarily anarchist) community-run endeavors. Situations where getting things done was separated out from paid work.

[theinnermeyoullneverknow]

i hate lean staffing

I hate lean staffing I hate lean staffing I hate lean staffing iHATE lean staffing Even when I it understand where they're coming from I fucking hate lean staffing. You need some goddamn redundancy or things are gonna get fucked up and people are trying to do 4 things at once so of course they're gonna miss things but heaven forbid you allow them or anyone else the time to check things. I. FUCKING. HATE. LEAN. FUCKING. STAFFING.

[unabletowatchmits]

I’d like a one year weekend now please thank you.

[shitslikethis]

it is my personal opinion that if your workplace does lean staffing, they should have to pay you time and half. working retail on christmas day was less exhausting and inconvenient than whatever this is.