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by econ 36 days ago
Seeing is believing I guess?

I often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.

Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.

So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.

The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.

Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)

It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.

Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.

Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!

With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.