
Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for Its 130,000 Baristas - blatherard
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/starbucks-to-revise-work-scheduling-policies.html
======
sharkweek
This article that sparked the response is phenomenal:

"Working anything but 9-5" \-
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-
workers-scheduling-hours.html?_r=1)

A lot of the problems she is dealing with are things I have never experienced
and likely never will. The things she is facing on a regular basis are
personal nightmares of mine. Imagine if your life story started out "drug
addicted mother and an absent father," what a disadvantage that is. Certainly
worth a read.

~~~
vacri
_Maria Trisler is often dismissed early from her shifts at a McDonald’s in
Peoria, Ill., when the computers say sales are slow. The same sometimes
happens to Ms. Navarro at Starbucks._

This is just a plain evil tactic, moving the cost of bad capacity planning
from management, who made the decision, to the employee.

~~~
pc86
It's easy to blame it on bad capacity planning, but some times it really is
just irregularly slow (or busy). When I waited tables it wasn't at all unheard
of for the manager to ask if someone wanted to leave if it was abnormally
slow. If there were no volunteers (or if everyone was indifferent) they almost
always picked someone to go home.

Same goes for it being extremely busy and calling someone who is off and
asking if they wanted to come in to make some extra money.

~~~
lthornberry
Even if it's not bad planning, the business is the more appropriate party to
bear the risk of unexpected slow times than the employee. The employee has
already reserved the time in her schedule because she's been told that she
will be working then. Even if it turns out her works is not needed, she should
be paid for those hours.

~~~
jaxn
Except that there are plenty of people who are willing to work for these
terms.

I own several retail stores. Labor is by far the largest manageable cost and
whether or not we make any profit is often a direct result of managing our
labor cost.

Re: being the one who should bear the risk, I am also the one who bears the
responsibility to make sure they have a job tomorrow. If we don't make money
then there is no job.

Of course, the alternative is that we could raise prices so that we don't have
to be ruthlessly efficient. But then, the market doesn't tend to like that.

~~~
ejstronge
I appreciate your position as a business owner but I take issue with your
assertion that it's okay to dismiss workers because 'there are plenty of
people who are willing to work for' those terms.

There are also other practices that people might be allowed to perform but
which are prohibited - consider, for example, young children working for
businesses outside the home. I don't think the willingness of labor is a
reasonable metric to gauge the fairness of a business practice.

In general, I think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that
pro-business positions (even understandable ones like what you're mentioning)
don't unfairly hurt workers - to be fair, 'flexible' hours have been mentioned
by the Obama administration multiple times this summer.

~~~
jaxn
The option isn't between a job with irregular hours and a job with regular
hours. The option is between a job with irregular hours and no job.

With all of the talk about raising the minimum wage drastically (small
increments are fine), or something like requiring a certain minimum shift
length, it will push small business owners towards non-human workers faster
(automation and robots).

~~~
kazagistar
That sounds really good. The only possible way that would be bad is if we
insist on keeping society in a state where not having a job is not an
acceptable state. But why would we insist on everyone working, once we can
automate most of what people do?

------
philip1209
I'm working on scheduling problems at StaffJoy - shoot me an email (philip at
staffjoy dot com) if you are interested in the field.

We are revising classic OR scheduling methods to fit small workforces. With
fewer workers comes fewer constraints and more canonical solutions, so just
minimizing cost does not always create the best schedules - in fact, with
little or no increase in net employee hours worked per week you can make
cleaner schedules that prevent things like "clopens" and give employees
consecutive days off every week.

We are accomplishing better small-workforce schedules using a two-stage
nonlinear model that first minimizes net employee hours (cost), then holds
that minimized sum as a constraint (plus optional flexibility) to pick the
canonical schedule that meets "nice to have" criteria, like letting employees
pick preferred shifts ("I like to work mornings").

To learn more about the difficulties in scheduling, check out the "Nurse
scheduling problem":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_scheduling_problem)

~~~
thearn4
Yikes, sounds like a pretty tricky mixed integer programming problem. What are
the usual go-to techniques for optimization? branch & bound?

~~~
philip1209
We're experimenting with different solving techniques. One of the difficult
parts to fit into an algorithm cleanly is "pick how many shifts this employee
should have" \- e.g. should a part-time employee have two 8-hour + one 4-hour
shifts, or one 8-hour + three 4-hour shifts. If you are trying to build that
logic into the solver then branch and bound struggles but something like basin
hopping seems to work better. However, with fewer employees you can just solve
all possible weekly shifts per employee in parallel with a branch and bound.
The most basic way to calculate the range is using the hours an employee works
in a week and dividing it by both the minimum shift length ("not worth coming
in for a shift of less than two hours") and max shift length ("don't have
somebody work for more than 8 hours in a day"). Gets more complex when you
move into problems like required number of days off per week.

~~~
jaxn
What is your target market?

I own several retail stores that usually have 2-6 employees on the clock at
any given time and don't see any meaningful benefit at our level. I could see
how a place with 20 employees on the clock at one time might have more
benefit, but that seems like a pretty small market to me.

~~~
philip1209
It's a solution searching for a problem. I talked to many coffee shop and
restaurant owners, and my conclusion was that independent stores would be hard
to acquire as customers, require more ongoing support, and bring in less
revenue. Initially I am planning on targeting medical (ERs, private ambulance
companies), construction, warehouses, and chains where there are economies of
scale or higher-paid hourly workers that would justify such a solution.

~~~
wlievens
There's a good reason it's called the Nurse Scheduling Problem, not the
Barrista Scheduling Problem :-)

When my twins were in NICU, it hit me what a challenge it must be to schedule
nurses in such a unit. Accross the three shifts in a day, the nurse/patient
ratio is a little over one. I think for about 30 NICU babies you had about 75
nurses, so this is an interesting planning problem.

------
jt2190
Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove
the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as
biased) manner. Some examples:

* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee A also gets along with the manager better that employee B.

* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B because employee A has worked for the company longer. Employee B is equally capable of doing the work.

* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee B feels that it's because of race/gender/sexual orientation.

* Employee A covers the shift of employee B. Employee A now has enough hours to qualify as a "full-time" employee, causing an administrative headache.

This is not to say that completely randomizing work schedules is the answer,
just to point out that there's more reasoning for these systems than the
article suggests.

(edit: I worked for a major U.S. retailer when they were implementing such a
system.)

~~~
justin66
> Part of the reason that companies enacted irregular schedules was to remove
> the ability of managers to schedule employees in a biased (or perceived as
> biased) manner.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? (I hate to be that guy, but,
wow...)

~~~
jt2190
I'm not sure what evidence you're asking for... That people sometimes feel
discriminated against?

(edit: The mere fact that Starbuck's has 130,000 barristas at any given point
in time makes it quite likely that someday one of those barristas will sue
them for discrimination because they couldn't get the shifts they wanted. If
the company can prove that the shifts were assigned using an algorithm and not
by a person, they have a good chance of winning their case.)

~~~
mmanfrin

      I'm not sure what evidence you're asking for... That people sometimes feel discriminated against?
    

No, he's asking for evidence to the claim that irregular schedules are a
result of trying to avoid discrimination, because that is a big claim.

------
nandreev
Worth a re-read:
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
chrismealy
A friend of mine had an internship helping folks appeal denied unemployment
insurance claims. Almost every case come down to the employer playing schedule
games and forcing the employee to quit.

------
dghughes
Scheduling is so amazing when you are first exposed to it, I never used to
work shift work until a few years ago but it was well-organized; minimum two
weeks posting of your schedule, very few late/early shifts.

Then as the years went on and new people took over it changed abruptly to
pretty much daily. Lots of terrible shifts like 2pm to 10pm.

One time my schedule changed five times in one hour. I've talked to staff who
were on vacation and had their schedule changed to require them to work or
change so much they return not having a clue what happened.

Names of staff in an Excel spreadsheet seems to be the most common way for
supervisors unfamiliar with anything other than typing words and numbers into
a cell, and even then some can't even highlight or add colour.

I can certainly see the value in a good schedule and a good application to
create it but the complexity of it, business needs, lack of skill of
management all seem to converge into one big clusterfuck.

------
pokstad
I used to close and open the next day at Starbucks. Didn't mind though, since
they worked within my college schedule and gave me hours that fit around my
classes. Still, good to hear they are making advancements in how their
employees are treated. First health care, then college, now better work/life
balance. What's really great is how they accomplish this without being
required to. Good job Starbucks.

------
recalibrator
The last line of the article is heart-rending: _“I want to surprise everyone,”
she said, “because no one is expecting anything of me.”_

I have no doubt she will.

------
mindcrime
The most interesting bit of the article, to me, is this:

 _“Encouraging managers not to rely entirely on the automated software is the
best thing they can do. But I’m doubtful of how many managers will actually do
it,” she said, because of the wide variation in how managers at different
stores treat their employees._

Why? Because it gets to the point that a company may, _on the whole_ be trying
to do the right thing, and may have progressive policies, etc., but - at the
end of the day - it is individual middle managers who most directly impact the
conditions that workers experience.

I doubt this point will resonate with the left'ish wing folks who consider all
business owners evil, blab about "capitalist oppressors" and want a wholesale
adoption of socialist (or psuedo-socialist) policies, but this is the truth.
Companies are _not_ inherently evil, and companies can - and do - choose to
try to do right by their employees... but enforcing consistent application of
a policy related to working conditions is just as a difficult as enforcing
consistent application of _any_ policy in a large organization.

The question then, to me, is whether or not Starbucks can find a way to ensure
that this policy _is_ actually adhered to. And at any rate, good on them for
at least making the attempt.

~~~
MeVfm
> Companies are not inherently evil

You're right, companies are inherently amoral. If their pursuit of profit
happens to be moral, all the better, but don't expect them to rescind immoral
policies if it means it'll hurt profit and nobody with any power is around to
put on pressure to make them stop.

When they do awful things, those poor persecuted businessmen can always count
on apologists like you to come to their defence though.

~~~
waps
Problem with that is that there is no "evil" there is only good and "amoral".

I fully subscribe to one of the basic economic axioms. That people act out of
self-interest (whether being a manager in a capitalist system or volunteering
in a hospital in North Korea). This is a rule that's true "on average", not
absolutely, but it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases you'll look
at.

That means "evil" barely ever happens. There are very, very few people who
hurt others knowing they'll also hurt themselves in the process (there are, in
theory they should be confined to insane asylums). This suggests it's at least
a Nash balance.

Almost all people who commit bad acts do so because they are expected a
benefit in return. Murder, theft, rape, hell, even suicide bombing ... all
come with a benefit to the perpetrator. This makes their actions fit your
description of "amoral".

The opposite of good is not your definition of evil. That's merely insanity.
I'm not saying that never happens, but it very rarely do. The opposite of good
is your definition of "amoral", and because of that it makes a lot of sense to
call anything amoral evil.

Having some machine learning experience I might also mention that I've noticed
on easy communality in evil versus good. There is this concept of "time
horizon" of decisions. Because predicting the world is a cpu and memory
expensive process, when evaluating a decision people only simulate X time out.
X is called the time horizon. If there is a decision that will have good
effects for X-1, and cause a disaster at X, they will make that decision. What
we call evil can, to some extent, be simplified as being a "decision with low
time horizon" and good is the opposite. Hell, what most saints did can be
summarized as making decisions where the time horizon is far longer than their
lifespan, which doesn't make sense for most people.

Alternatively one could say that you're trying to let companies get away from
being called "evil" by taking a far extreme and then showing that they don't
satisfy that standard. That you are presenting a "reductio ad absurdum"
fallacy.

