[throwaway1979]

Wow ... this story reminds me of Marshall Brain's Manna story.

I don't understand how much money a company would lose if they changed the hours to 3 or 4 hours per person. Fine, they'd double or triple their workforce and have to deal with more HR/paperwork. But the costs don't increase. This makes me wonder if the reason is not cost but control. If company X is the only thing in your life, you will likely be a more "compliant" worker. This kind of stuff scares the heck out of me :(

[jrochkind1]

Dude, how about this line from the OP Guardian article? It kind of is Manna...

> A handset told him what to collect and put on his trolley. It allotted him a set number of seconds to find each product and counted down. If he made a mistake the scanner beeped.

> "We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.

[krstck]

That's not actually better for the employees, unless they're just part-time students looking for a side job. You can't support yourself or a family on 4 hour shifts a day. Also, and I never actually directly dealt with the paperwork of hiring so I can't confirm this, but it's my understanding that it is actually more expensive to hire someone new than give a current employee more hours due to now having to provide benefits for two people.