My Kind of Plan

It sure stinks when your days and nights can be summed up just with "work" and "sleep". There is very little time for anything else, and when you're off, you're dead (or least I am) for most of it, which is quite a drawback to having any kind of "freedom" when your locked in service for the system.

So it made me pretty happy to see that the drastic reduction in hours (since most of the available hours get gobbled up by the full time workers guaranteed for 40 hours a week) after the first of the year -- and theres another cut coming next week.

There is a bit of a catch to it all, but I'm not complaining too much. But why not outline it anyway:

You are scheduled to work for say four hours on a given night at my workplace, but you are practically told to stay until you've put in eight. So it doesn't matter how few hours a night they schedule you, you could be scheduled to come in for 3 nights, 4 hour shifts each (12 hours on the schedule for the week), but in the end you still work eight hours anyway (doubling the hours if there is no overtime on a given day of work) more often than not at my workplace.

It's a means of getting around limitations on hours you can schedule people (because they only get X number of hours to schedule, with scraps going to the part timers), and if I didn't need to work a full eight hours when scheduled only four or five, for the money, I'd be incredibly pissed.

Hell, it's not really my need right now that I'm fulfillin by working, it's more of societies need / requirement of indentured service by individuals to itself that's being fulfilled, I just lump what I get into savings for the most part --until I get the inclination to use some of it. I'm not gonna just toss it out left and right like others who make less than me do (for one, what if I were to lose my job tomorrow and not have a source of income for weeks or maybe months? I'll have savings to conservatively draw from whereas person B would be screwed).

One reason why I like that catch: If on one night there are three to four part timers scheduled (hell, even on nights where they may only be two), and we all leave when scheduled (at the most there are eight people working on a given day/night, but it's usually seven) to after 4 or 5 hours of work, the store/rest of the night crew would be thoroughly screwed with no doubt an hour or two of overtime having to finish where we each left off (almost justifiably, it wouldn't be our problem - we left when the schedule said we could).

Perhaps this has happened in the past and the "catch to the hours scheduled" was initiated as a contingency plan to avoid the above situation, a type of correction to a "systemic anomaly" I guess you could call it that I'd be prone to devising. Hence why I like it. It also shows how at my work place there is considerable power held by part timers (but since we all tentatively "work together" to get the store done before we leave, it is a power not exercised. There is also the lack of a desire to exercise it.

That contingency plan has one "flaw" (as all plans usually do): And that is that there is nothing in the rules that can prevent someone from leaving when the schedule says they are free to leave. Sure, the boss can blackmail / threaten them by telling them that they won't schedule you off on days you'd prefer to be off on (commonly Friday and Saturday), but any disciplinary action could no doubt be countermanded by the Union (an empire within the shadow of an empire...).

Essentially, the "contingency plan"/"catch" is problem solving, something I occassionally like to do depending on circumstances and amount of understanding or perceived understanding of the factors involved in the problem, which is why I found this as good enough of a topic to semi-randomly ramble about.

And it's also to a degree a basic of politics. Problem solving, exercising "control", trying to keep those with more "control" from realizing it or from feeling inclined to utilize it, etc.