But they may be able to hire additional shifts or work overtime on existing production lines.
Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.
It is not uncommon for factory workers to prefer 12 hour shifts and working alternating 3 and 4 day work weeks. That staffs a 24x7 operation with four crews of workers.
Not only that, many factories are 24/7. So not only do workers have their weekends scattered throughout the week, but they have their shifts scattered throughout the day/night. The same for certain retail.
But many do not do this, as well. It all depends on what the production target of the factory is and how much throughput the supply chain has. I think those factors tend to determine this much more than worker satisfaction.
In my personal experience, I worked at a factory that would typically run two shifts, so 16-20 hours a day in production (variable), and the third shift overnight for maintenance/cleanup, 7 days a week. But if the prices were high enough for the product at the time and the supply was in place, it would run as close to 24/7 in production as possible.
I worked a graveyard shift at a factory in college one summer because it was the only job that I could really find after weeks of looking. I definitely feel for the people who did it for a living.
That said, the companies aren't going to just stop, they'll just charge higher prices. To stop producing in the third shift, they'll need to:
- add more daytime production lines, which means buying more floor space, possibly in a different location with new logistics to work out
- new capex for the new lines
- higher overhead because your newly expanded production lines are idle 30% of the time
- higher overhead from daily startup and shutdown times
This is all for companies where it is feasible to do so. Some plants measure startup and shutdown in hours, if not days. Doing a full cycle every day would mean redesigning their entire operation, if it is even possible to do so at all.
Even places like hospitals don't exactly get to choose to just turn off all the life support and lights at night.
That's unusual in the auto industry. Usually, plants run a second shift rather than paying overtime to the first shift. It's cheaper. Accident rates go up and quality goes down as employees get tired. You have to have a meal break in there, which costs more line downtime than a shift change.
Real industries that run 24-hours a day and have to be up all the time, run three shifts, they don't screw their day-shift into having to be available at the drop of a hat to cover.
They also pay significant overtime multipliers when they do have to call somebody in outside of their scheduled hours.
I don't get this. Why push your work force like this?
It's clearly very bad for the workers.
And also for the factory, surely having 3 shifts is more efficient because your workers are not as fatigued so will work faster with fewer mistakes?
My impression was that the extra hours are due to the factories being on a 24/7 uninterrupted production cycle. Having people work 12 hour shifts instead of 8 reduces the headcount required by 33%.
Moving 2/3 of your existing engineering staff to a different shift would raise enormous large communications issues for a company otherwise designed for an aligned workday.
Hiring, say, minimum 4 people to do nothing but waiting for a page would be incredibly wasteful and probably ineffective as they'd have no idea what to do if something went wrong because they didn't work on the system.
For 24x7 production operations, 12 hour shifts make a lot of sense. You work 12 hours, hand off your role to the next incoming shift, and 12 hours later they hand off back to you. You do this for 3 days one week, 4 days the next. 4 hours of OT every day. I did this for 2 years at an LSI fab in Colorado Springs and it was great.
From a manufacturing standpoint, having to add an additional crew to a 24 hour schedule would also mean additional handoffs and opportunities for things to be missed. In my experience, manufacturing shifts are typically not more than 12.5 hours, but may bump to 16ish if there are calloffs and the like.
My understanding is that in the medical field, handoffs are viewed as large opportunities for mistakes to happen through miscommunication, and that's at least some of the justification behind having people work 12-24+ hour shifts.
Out of curiosity, do Japanese companies not use multi-shift schedules? A former employer of mine ran three shifts, particularly for hardware testing, and I don't see how such a schedule could work with that sentiment.
A company that wants to operate 24/7 would need to hire for the night-shift. This would be based on demand, of course. Night-shift hours are probably lower since most customers go to sleep at night.
I don't see why hiring evening and night staff would be that different apart from training. It's probably a bit more difficult to find people that want to work the night shift... some companies get around this by rotating staff between the day and night shifts regularly to give everyone a chance to lead a normal life.
A dedicated on call rotation also isn't a valid case for working after hours.
If companies want their infrastructure worked on 24/7 they need to hire 3 shifts to take care of it. If they don't want to pay for 3 shifts they should shut their business down after hours like a normal business, not exploit people by making them work 24/7.
I've got a friend on the assembly line in Fremont. He says he doesn't mind the hours too much. However, they basically keep adding extra or overtime shifts to his schedule. I think right now he might be working 5 or 6 day weeks, and I'm fairly sure they're minimum 8 hours, and obviously with overtime could be several hours above that.
Sounds awful, but in some ways isn't that how manufacturing has sort of always been?
This is handled the same way 24/7 availability is handled. The company employs some multiple of the employees it needs to handle regular demand during the day. Some of these employees happen to like working at night. Others like working during the day. All are required to put in some number of hours per week in order to qualify for the perks that come with full time employment.
When a spike in demand occurs, a page goes out to all employees who currently aren’t on the road requesting that all those who can do so safely proceed immediately to an area that has unfilled demand.
Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.
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