A New Shift, Finally

On Thursday we had a meeting with the Sheriff and the Dispatch Commander and we were told about all the things that have been swirling around the schedule process. We were also given two different shifts to look at. Schedule 1 was a 5 day 8 hour shift with 2 days off. The advantages are less overtime by about 300 hours a month and no mandatory overtime required to make it work, though there would be overtime to be signed up for. Schedule 2 was a 4 day 12 hour shift with 3 days off. There is 8 hours of overtime a week built into the schedule that everybody would work. That is over 1100 hours a month built in when we have only been averaging 800-1000 hours month. There is no other overtime required unless a large number of people are off at the same time for illness or what have you.  

After talking about the merits and drawbacks of both schedules we were told to vote for the one we wanted. If this was how the Sheriff wanted to handle this why did we have to wait so long to do it. I really didn't care what shift we ended up with but I did vote for the 12 hour shift. I rather thought that the 8 hour shift would be the one that won but to my surprise the 12 hour schedule won. So starting April and going at least through June that is the shift we will work. I for one am not really looking forward to 48 hour weeks but I will take the extra money and run to the bank. This also helps with my retirement as it is based on the highest earnings you have had. So I will pad my retirement out a little bit. 

The funny thing about all of this is that it was the gross amount of mandatory overtime we had been working that started all this. So the answer is a schedule that builds in more mandatory overtime than we had ever been asked to work. Go figure.  I wonder how all this will work out when we do the employee satisfaction evaluations later this year. We were told this was a temporary thing until we had more people trained and we could reach some agreement on what minimum staffing was. That's right we really don't know what the staffing levels should be for any given time in the center. Strange way to run a business especially since all the previous overtime was to meet minimum staffing levels. So how are we going to know when we can go back to 10 hour shifts. Also we are still going to lose about 10 people before the year is out. So we could be on this shift for some time to come.