Job Sharing Experience

This isn’t really job sharing,... but it worked for me and my employees. When I had my design and fabrication shop... there were times when work was slow, and I had to lay off. This was hard for me to decide on who to lay off. I just had a all around wonderful crew of employees.

The employees didn’t want this either, they enjoy working for me and had actually came up with this, where they would rotate layoffs, where a number of employees would be laid off for (2) weeks, come back to work and another set would get laid off, fortunately, this lasted for only 6 weeks until we got back on track with new orders.

This is one way about, possibly, how job-sharing should be...

For the past 8-9 years, employers in the private sector wanted to hire only those most promising job applicants who seemed most likely to be able to sit right down and make the employer money, with as little guidance and/or training as possible...

Employers essentially wanted someone else to do the trainning so they wouldn't have to pay for it...

The result was that the production of newly-trained workers sunk well below the level-of-demand for them, hence the current dearth thereof...

However, (National Government) could have afforded to do some of such trainning, but largely did not...

Now, if government created/funded new job-trainning/apprentice/job-sharing positions during economic down-turns, then more (semi-)trained workers would be available for the economic up-turns...

I find it to have a mix works out best,.. for a number of reasons. For me,... I didn’t want to give up my investment on the employees, and the employees didn’t want to give up theirs investment in the company.

Fortunately ?

Sounds like a dream job.

Work 2 weeks, get two weeks vacation.

Where do I sign up ?

Actually, it didn't even make a full rotation.

This was in around 2001-2002. Until new contracts came in, the employee decided, which amounted to the ones that took off first, didn't have pressing fiscal issues. after 6 weeks we were manned at 100%.

If I'd had laid them off, I would have run the risk of losing them. Afterwards, there were a number of larger companies that started doing this also. (After they weeded out the undesirables)

I can report on two instances of job sharing. My former specialty of anaesthesia was, i believe, the first medical specialty to promote job-sharing for the benefit of women, both trained and still in training, who wished to return after maternity leave. It worked very well to have them as colleagues, and I believe that the additional management costs were not important.

The second example was my wife, who shared school assistant duties with assorted friends for many years.

In both cases the benefit to the employer is that one of the sharers is always available to work, even when the other is on holiday.

One thing the military did, was to disperse routine chores to each duty section. That way, nobody had to be a "janitor specialist", and the jobs that nobody wanted were more evenly spread out (everybody got their turn). Also, there was this thing of "If you don't find something to do, I'll find something for you.

Sounds great!