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 :(
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.
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.
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 :(