Just because people are standing around, does not mean that they are all “lazy” construction workers fyi. Any number of them could be engineers or municipal employees.
Comment on The bosses are never going to just hand workers a 32 hour workweek.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week agoMarathon runners take no breaks.
Marathon runners take breaks between every marathon. Runners can require nearly a month of downtime between races in order to perform optimally.
How do you think tradesman handle working 8 hour shifts with only a 30 minute break?
So yes, it is in fact wasted.
Resting isn’t wasted time any more than sleeping is.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Right, but they handle the full shift of their duties in that time, and get their REST after. They get no breaks.
Thank you, that’s a union job, makes my point quite well, other tradesman would be canned for doing that. They can go a full shift without breaks.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s just a job. If you think people are working harder without a union, you’d be surprised. More often they’re being paid less to do less work, because the workers aren’t trained by their veteran peers to manage themselves.
The suffocating bureaucratization of the corporate world tends to make work sites more difficult and dangerous to navigate, tires people out more quickly, and ends up with exactly this kind of “six guys staring at a hole in the ground while one guy works” dynamic - because corporate only delegated one shovel for six people, to save money.
SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Nope.
Each one has their role, and can’t start till the one before is done. But it’s too difficult to coordinate and people don’t like sitting around at home not being paid. So they just pay everyone to stand around.
It’s why union jobs cost 10x as much as private, and do the exact same job.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But they can’t perform their work efficiently, because of the artificial constraints imposed by the business. I’ve worked these jobs and I’ve seen the tight-fisted nature of corporate drag a job out needlessly for months on a number of occasions.
They don’t cost 10x as much. They cost maybe 10-20% more, but with much thinner margins, because the workers get a bigger cut of the gross revenues. So you tend to see unions employed in bigger and more professional tier projects, where failure costs far more than some angry retail sucker giving you a bad Yelp review.
There’s no such thing as a single “normal jobsite”. You have different levels of job and different requirements for the job. On a new build, you can have multiple professionals working simultaneously if they’re well-managed. Or you can have a bunch of apprentice-tier dorks waiting in line to do the next task, because the project manager is a paint-by-numbers guy taking instructions from some master planner that isn’t on site.