Can't unionize if you don't have the energy to fight.

This seems idiotic from the employer's perspective. You're limiting your pool of candidates a lot by requiring that their life can accomodate essentially 24 hours of possible shift time. Companies do shit like this and then complain "nobody wants to work anymore"

They can rotate my balls in and out of their mouth

Industrial engineer here. I have no fucking clue. It was theorized it might be better overall like 30 years ago, but by the time i graduated college it was understood that so long as you have management during changeovers so later shifts aren’t left confused or unsupervised you get all the real benefit of rotating shifts without the tremendous downside of all your workers being constantly off and pissed.

Also they should be providing later shifts with free healthy lunches and other incentives to keep them in good health to reduce the costs to their bodies of later shifts. Late shift operators need extra assistance because they’re living against society and circadian rhythms. Poor health also reduces performance so this isn’t what they should do because it’s right, it’s what they should do because if they don’t they’re always going to be frustrated at late shift performances

Because we havent had a general strike in a while

Because you’re not expected to have a home life that takes precedence over work anymore.

Rotating shifts sacrifice the employees everything to reduce staffing and training costs.

What I have gathered after seeing threads like this pop up on Reddit periodically over about 11 years, and most of the responses here, is...

Fuck if there's a reason.

No, seriously. Pretty sure it's become standard and as Capitalism and Management do, they follow whatever bullshit tradition exists.

That said, I personally have always felt factory and retail work fuck with schedules so much because it maintains control and limits sociability outside of work and work groups. Thus increasing retention by artificially creating social nodes we feel a part of and/or do not want to be removed from. Likely created by the same people who cut pensions and created things like Mining Towns.

Sounds like they had to do that to keep the night shift people from quitting. Probably not a place to go work lol.

Are they just trying to destroy your soul and your health?

Yes,

But likely for a very stupid reason like 50 years ago some consultant had to give a plan to increase efficiency but forgot until the night before.

I used to work at a place with 3 shifts, and they rotated them because everyone wanted 1st shift rather than 2nd and 3rd. I chose to stay on 2nd because it paid a bit more and I don't like getting up early. It would have been hell to switch every single week!

I think the big issue is that the rotation is every week. Every other week or more would be better.

In a strong union environment, this would likely get addressed with a combination of higher pay and seniority. Senior people choose their shifts and if junior members have to work night shifts, at least they get compensated.

It's because there aren't enough unions in this godforsaken country.

If anyone's willing to put up with that schedule you might as well try for being an air traffic controller. Way higher salary.

Kia plant I worked at for 4 years was like this. Countless wrecks after shift change, untold divorces and ruined lives due to never being able to plan anything. Terrible

I've worked this shift pattern before, and found it very difficult. They call it a 'continental' shift pattern in the UK - it's not a new thing, 'cos the job I'm thinking of was 30 years ago. Switching from sleeping during the night to sleeping during the day is okay if you're on permanent nights, but trying to change every couple of weeks can be impossible (I remember once failing to get any real sleep during the day, having to spend the next 12 hours at work, and then collapsing on my way home the next day.)

Fuck if I know the answer to this, but someone I know well and respect works one of these shifts, and I don’t get it.

4 on 3 off and swap the next week, I get.

But it’s like these were designed to fuck up the workers’ health and lives. Oh, wait, they probably were.

You don't wanna see the schedule of a relative of mine that works as a hospital nurse then.
And she has the good version of the schedule.
You really don't wanna see the schedule of an emergency admission nurse.
Daily changing hours of various schedules switching between early and late with maybe the minimum or 2-3h more of break between shifts...

I am guessing these workers don’t have a union.

I work a "9-5," which is basically remote meetings or email from 7-8:30 while I try to eat something and get my kids dressed, work through lunch so I can take "lunch" at the end of the day to be able to pick my kids up in time, go home and finish emails and hope to wrap up by dinner.

How people are working schedules like this is beyond me. I'm going insane as it is, and my job is "cushy." My doctor tells me I need to work less and create less stress in my life or I'm going to start bleeding out of my ears, and he looks more tired than I do. I feel like the only hour or two I get to relax is right before bed, which makes me stay up late desperately trying to hold onto that feeling of mild relaxation because I know, at best, I won't feel that way for another 24 hours.

My doctor says I need to follow up and crap for concerns, and I keep explaining to him that I have to come during work, which means 12min out if his day, but between driving, checking in, waiting in the waiting room, finally going back to the patient room, nurse check in, waiting, talking to the doctor, checking back in at the front desk, then driving back to work DURING THE WORK DAY is like two hours, and it also means if I do the follow up, labs, follow ups, specialist, labs suggested... I'll lose my job, which provides the insurance to afford those things in the fucking first place.

Everyone where I work is scared to quit for fear of working more hours on a worse schedule for less money. Everyone at the top seems to work remote at will and forces us into meetings about how to reduce burnout like they do, which is apparently by working less, having more schedule freedom, and then bragging about it by holding meetings about how to live more like they do, which, if we did, would get all of us fired within a month.

if you have to work all three shifts every three weeks, you can't realistically hold-down a second job or attend regular classes, you're exclusively at the disposal of your masters.

It's usually because they can't get full teams willing to work only the shitty shifts. So they rotate.

When I was in retail management we had a 3-week rotating shift as well, and it was super dumb. We'd end up over 3 weeks opening, closing, or having off each day once, except for Tuesday, which we opened twice (Tuesdays were staff meetings so all managers worked).

But the worst part was each week we'd start with 2 closing shifts and end with 2 opening shifts instead of doing all opens or closes, so each week we'd have a night we'd get out the door around midnight and have to be back to open the doors at 6am...

i like that you only have to work 2/4 weekends in a month. That's pretty cool.

How nice and thoughtful of them.

I was a manager of a team with rotating 12 hour 6 to 6 shifts.

It was a datacenter. We had to staff the building 24x7x365. Billions of dollars of equipment, not to mention the transactions flowing through. No mistakes allowed here.

We paid $15/hour in 2010. Entry level. But it was a foot into the industry for someone without experience. Tasks were light security, walk the floor, swap drives, be on hand for server emergencies.

We used the rotation to onboard. No one did nights solo (no one else in the building) until they knew the job. Two weeks days, two weeks nights, back and forth. Two days on, one day off. 6-day rotation meant no one person was always stuck with weekends. And overtime pay every week.

We managed the schedule with a staff of 4.

Prior, the night shifts were handled by sysadmins who would work a day shift, go to the break room and get a few hours of sleep between tasks, then shower and go back on day shift. That really sucked. I did it for more than a year.

We had plenty of applicants every time a position opened. Folks tended to like the rotation as no one would get stuck with repeat holidays or all overnight. It sucked in a fair way to everyone. And if someone missed a shift (sick, emergency, etc.) I would have to fill the shift. It happened at least once a month. It was a good team. I liked all of my people, and after I got canned, they all wrote recommendations for me on LinkedIn.