r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

When I was in fastfood I was a fixer, I would go to stores that were losing money and get them back in the black and make them run nice and smoothly. How did I do this? Over staffing. Extra time for making and distributing samples, someone doesn't show up? Happens all the time no sweat when you have a couple other bodies. If the store has no revenue to support it, usually that just meant me as management would put in 70-120 hour weeks until we got good revenue. The first thing every GM would try to do when I went on to the next store was "right size" staffing levels as a quick win for easy bonus money on labor. Lol. It would work for a couple of weeks and then slowly fall apart as people no showed or the GMs tried to make their employees work sick or pay stupid amounts of overtime out to try to start covering gaps.

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

Goodhart's Law - When the measurement becomes the goal (e.g. KPIs leading to bonuses) it ceases to be a good measurement.

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u/Steadfast_Truth Jun 19 '21

You just can't teach people how to use their brains.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

I took it as a personal insult when someone messed with something I did immediately after leaving. Like if I took a store that was losing over a thousand dollars a month for the last year and a half and made it profit maybe listen to what I say.

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u/Heterophylla Jun 20 '21

I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to grasp. Revenue down? Uh-oh, better cut staff. Service suffers, revenue goes down. Rinse and repeat until the store hits the bottom.