(no subject)

[naath]

Random thought on the news: in NI there is a problem with people not having water, because the water-company employees are on a work-to-rule. It strikes me as very odd that the water-company is so short-staffed that it is reliant on the good-will (and overtime-working) of its employees to manage to provide even a basic service!

Comments

[andrewducker]

There are, sadly, many many companies that assume that people will work overtime in order to be able to deliver their service.

And many people dependent on overtime in order to live comfortably.

[siliconshaman]

Years of staff cut-backs to save money and relying on people to do more with less to make up the short-fall.

[gerald_duck]

Suppose you are a company whose workers are all fully busy, and you expand your business by 20%.

If you get your existing staff to do 20% overtime, you can shrink the workforce later with impunity. If you hire 20% more staff, you have union consultations and redundancy pay and bad publicity and all the rest on your hands if you try to shrink the workforce.

Alternatively: an overworked friend of mine in the NHS says that there, overtime and hiring come from different budgets…