Short Staffing

Work intensification is as old as our economy. Over the years, U.S. business owners have gotten more out of their employees by beating them, timing their motions, or speeding them up to match the pace of machines. Now they are engaging in short staffing—deliberately hiring too few people and pushing them to keep production up.
Short staffing has spread from retailers like Amazon to manufacturing, health care, and the public sector. Across the economy, it may be the latest business model. Where did it start, what made it possible, and how can we push back?

“We are so short-staffed we are in massive danger,” Abe Snowman told more than 100 fellow union members at the Maine AFL-CIO’s yearly Labor Summer Institute last August. “Staffing is at 37–38%. We work 12-hour shifts plus mandatory overtime. We are averaging three to 12 new injuries per week.”

Snowman is a union shop steward at Riverview Psychiatric Center, one of Maine’s two state mental health centers. He is on the behavioral response team in the secure unit, where he has had three major concussions, his right knee torn up, his thumb dislocated, his testicles grabbed, and has been spit on, kicked, and punched. “Patients’ needs are not being met” because of short staffing, he said, and some patients explode.

“It’s hard to convince people to stay when you’re in danger,” Snowman said in a recent interview. “New hires last an average of four weeks before they quit. We have 10 pages of job openings. They’re filling the gap with per diems and contract [workers] who are there for short periods of time. Per diems are more expensive but [hiring them is] a time saver. They don’t have to pay health insurance, and they aren’t unionized.”
Short staffing at Riverview is extreme, but similar situations are taking a toll on workers across Maine’s economy. Sarah Bigney McCabe of the Maine AFL-CIO told me that workers at the Sappi paper mill in Skowhegan are working 24-hour shifts or being drafted for tons of mandatory overtime; UPS is running “crazy overtime”; the U.S. Postal Service is running letter carriers ragged; and hospitals are chronically understaffed.

How can this happen when we have eight-hour workday laws and union contracts? Why is it happening in the public sector, which isn’t even trying to make a profit? And why is short staffing becoming the norm everywhere from the Riverview Psychiatric Center to Amazon and from Maine to California?

Is It a Labor Shortage?

Maine certainly has a labor shortage, with about two job openings for every unemployed worker. It has the oldest population in the nation (23% of the population is 65 years old or older). And those who have not retired face barriers to working: low pay, lack of benefits, unavailable childcare, and unpredictable scheduling, according to a 2021 survey by Maine’s Department of Labor. In October 2023, some 23,000 unemployed Mainers listed the lack of childcare or care for older adults as their main barrier to employment, according to the Maine Center for Economic Policy.

The 2021 survey also found that better job opportunities, affordable housing, and family care are needed if Maine workers, especially women, are going to rejoin the labor force or work more hours. Better pay helps, but it doesn’t solve hiring challenges by itself. For example, the shipyard at Bath Iron Works offers some of the state’s best-paid, most secure jobs. The company constantly advertises job openings. When applicants come to Bath, however, they find they can’t afford the cost of housing there.
Then there is the short staffing that some companies deliberately create. After 1998, when Florida Power and Light bought Central Maine Power’s non-nuclear generating plants, FPL cut staffing so sharply that workers joked that “FPL” stood for “Five People Left.” Cuts are even worse in the telephone company’s unionized workforce. In 2017, when Verizon sold Maine’s telephone system to FairPoint Communications, FairPoint cut its unionized workforce from 906 to 550 workers. Then Fairpoint sold the business to Consolidated Communications, which cut that workforce to 374—a total cut of 69%. Ask any Mainer what that has done to telephone service in the state.

So, is short staffing in Maine a demographic reality or a corporate policy? In the paper mills, it’s both. One the one hand, there’s a genuine, acute labor shortage. Many older workers retired during the Covid-19 pandemic and other workers found jobs in other industries like solar panel installation and windmill construction. The 2019 Maine Earned Pay Act gives workers the right to time off in emergencies, and mill managers have failed to adjust by increasing their labor pool. Younger workers want more of a balance between work and family life than some older workers did. The mill companies are always actively hiring, but they could be more aggressive, said United Steelworkers union representative John Perry.
On the other hand, the mill companies have increased their output since the early 2000s while cutting staff. The huge machines are running faster. Prices are high in a volatile industry and more tonnage is going out the door. “These companies are finding they can run by forcing people to work longer hours,” said Perry. “Eliminate this job, combine it with that job … and the companies are making record profits.” And where workers used to seek overtime income, now paper companies are forcing them to work.

The Roots of Short Staffing

In 1950, when the percentage of workers with union representation was at its highest and economic growth was rapid, workers made some of the biggest gains in U.S. history but did not vanquish short staffing. General Motors (GM) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) signed the so-called “Treaty of Detroit,” winning higher wages, pensions, and health care. That deal set new standards across U.S. industries. But even then, the Treaty of Detroit contained a fatal compromise. “GM may have paid a billion for peace. It got a bargain,” labor editor Daniel Bell wrote in Fortune magazine in 1950. Bell continued, “General Motors has regained control over one of the most crucial management functions in any line of manufacturing—long-range scheduling of production, model changes, and tool and plant investment.” In other words, the entire production process.

The production process is the key to workers’ power and the quality of your work life. If your employer depends on your skills and knowledge to produce goods, you have leverage. You can slow your pace and raise the cost of making each item. You can strike and stop production entirely. The UAW had the strength in 1950 to win wage increases and better benefits, but not to control the pace on the shop floor. So, the auto industry squeezed more profit out of each minute of work by speeding up the assembly lines—in effect, by short staffing. Line workers resisted with spontaneous strikes. The UAW shut down those “wildcat” strikes and delivered a steady workforce to the companies.

Then, in the late 1960s, increased competition from Western Europe and Japan led to a sharp drop in manufacturing profits, which broke the management-labor truce and sent short staffing in the manufacturing sector into overdrive. In fact, manufacturing’s profit crisis challenged the entire U.S. economic system.

Manufacturing was the backbone of the economy in the mid-1900s. Giant industrial corporations like GM bought materials and services from a network of suppliers. They borrowed from banks and repaid reliably with interest. The wages they paid their workers generated demand for home mortgages, car loans, and services like home construction. High corporate taxes paid for highways, schools, public infrastructure, and services that in turn strengthened the economy. Maybe most importantly, manufacturing’s exceptionally high profit rates drove capital accumulation—the process by which people with money turn it into more money. If you had money or controlled it, manufacturing companies’ stocks were the low-risk, high-return foundation for your investments.
What’s a CEO to do when price competition threatens your business model? The CEOs of the 1970s cut their costs in every way they could. They attacked unions and drove down wages. They moved factories south and shipped jobs overseas where the labor was cheaper. They pushed government to cut corporate taxes and taxes on high incomes. The tax cuts starved public services of resources and created a more desperate workforce. Corporate managers and wealth-holders attacked government regulations and the government’s ability to enforce labor laws.

“There was a genuine movement, the closest thing I’ve ever seen on the part of business in this country,” one business executive told sociologist Dan Clawson in The Next Upsurge. “It was a genuine virtual fervor. Let’s go out there, and we can do it, we can change the system.” And one of the lasting changes was the further intensification of work.

Lean and Mean

Two decades of union-busting and wage cuts from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s failed to bring U.S. manufacturing’s labor costs below Europe’s or Japan’s. But if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. In the late 1980s, a craze for Japanese production methods swept America’s managerial world: lean production.

Japanese auto companies had taken Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion methods and applied them relentlessly. Each task on Nissan’s assembly lines was allowed 70 seconds, divided into three or four sub-jobs taking 23 or 17 seconds each: “extend the right hand, pick up screw, insert through seal,” again and again over the workday. This “was only the opening shot in a permanent campaign to shave seconds and fractions of seconds off [each task] and so speed up the line….so that an entire job could be eliminated and the redundant worker’s tasks distributed among his or her surviving neighbors on the line,” business journalist Simon Head wrote in The New Ruthless Economy. Toyota, he continued, “was able to reduce its employment in one paint shop from eight to three employees over the course of four years simply by…cutting down worker walking distances.”

As activist and labor writer Kim Moody explained in Workers in a Lean World, once it was imported to the United States, “lean production…meant more effort and longer hours for most workers…. The new 10- or 12-hour day, four-day week turned into a 60-hour week at the A. E. Staley, Caterpillar, and Firestone plants” in Decatur, Ill. To work intensification, companies added work extension—longer hours.
Lean production also spread beyond the factory. “These practices have not only survived in U.S. manufacturing, but they have also crossed over and colonized the service industries which now dominate the U.S. economy,” wrote Head. “The most spectacular example of this colonization is the rise of ‘managed care,’ which is essentially the industrialization and reengineering of health care.”

Lean production, as Head put it, “undervalues employee skill and experience, surrounds employees with a pervasive regime of monitoring and control, and encourages an all-powerful management to treat its workforce as a commodity.” But it also makes production fragile. The entire assembly line is one just-in-time system where each worker must complete their task in, say, 70 seconds. Every worker must work at maximum speed. A breakdown at one point disrupts the whole line. And if one workplace is linked to others in a just-in-time system, shutting down or disrupting that one workplace can throw a wrench into the rest.

Digitize This!

Computerization moved Taylorism out of the factory and into services. In service work there was no assembly line to surveil workers in the service sector. But digital software can monitor each individual worker. It records keystrokes. It tracks call center workers’ time on each call. It tells fast food workers how many seconds they have to take an order, heat the items, and wrap them up (see box, “McDonald’s Operations and Training Manual”). It tells UPS drivers what route they must take and writes them up if they deviate, even when the software’s route is wrong. It’s like having the boss in the cab with you, looking over your shoulder every second.
Employers who fully control the work process don’t have to retain workers or pay or treat them adequately. Of course, many workers will quit intolerable jobs as soon as they are able. “But high turnover, and the consequent need to hire new bodies quickly and without scrutiny, is intentional. It’s central to the way these companies operate,” Emily Guendelsberger said in On the Clock.

Guendelsberger worked at an Amazon warehouse, a call center in Maryland named Convergys, and McDonald’s from 2015 through 2017. The quit rate was high in all three industries—but these companies had deskilled work so completely that they could hire constantly, train minimally, alienate broadly, and churn through employees at machine speed. That is the service industry’s business model.

Using algorithms that predict the coming week’s need for labor, “Businesses also save a lot of money by scheduling the absolute minimum number of workers to handle the predicted business,” continued Guendelsberger. “And they can save even more by scheduling slightly fewer people than can handle the predicted work at a reasonable pace.” There you have a definition of short staffing.

Workers have finally become extensions of machines, only now the machines are computers. Digital Taylorism is intrusive, infuriating, and exhausting physically and mentally (see Robert Ovetz, “Taylor’s Digital Stopwatch: Confronting Algorithmic Management,” D&S, November/December 2022). “It’s a depressing but undeniable reality: the vast majority of employees feel depleted, diminished, disenfranchised, demoralized, and disengaged at work,” said a 2014 report from the Harvard Business Review and the Energy Project. The report continues:
For 200 years, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, the model for how to work has been the machine, and more recently, the computer. … Machines are valued for their speed, efficiency, and predictability. They make no demands. When they break, they can be repaired or replaced. Computers run even faster and do more. The assumption in organizations has been that people ought to be able to work in the same way.
Until they get sick or die.

Enter the Virus

Short staffing exploded when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Many workplaces went remote to protect employees’ health, but “essential workers” had to stay on the job in health care, meatpacking, and many other, not all-that-essential industries. Corporations across the economy lost workers but discovered they could run a very lean workforce while seeing their profits skyrocket. Many of these industries are still short-staffed. The pandemic burned out so many health care workers that health care, too, is still short-staffed. But management isn’t necessarily trying to fix the problem. Instead, short staffing seems to be management’s preferred strategy.

“I’ve been an Amazon driver for years,” Jeffrey Arias, a “delivery service partner” in New York, told Labor Notes in September 2024. “[I]n in the last year, it’s gotten a lot harder, with longer hours, more packages and hotter conditions.” Short staffing now means employees work harder and longer—work extension piled on top of work intensification.

To sum it up, three key factors brought short staffing to today’s extremes:
Union-busting drove down workers’ power and wages, allowing managers to restructure the work process repeatedly. Lower wages also enabled the massive expansion of a low-wage service sector. The service sector now employs some 80% of U.S. workers. Low-wage workers, desperate for jobs, are vulnerable to the speed-up, surveillance, and churning at companies like Amazon. The growing low-wage economy also drives down wage standards, overtime practices, and workers’ expectations of quality of life on the job in a vicious circle.

Digitization enabled the extreme speed, surveillance, and stress that are becoming the norm in U.S. workplaces. It is also extending the short-staffing experience to remote workers, whose keystrokes and time-outs can be monitored digitally, intensifying their work while extending it beyond formal work hours. Meanwhile, AI is threatening to increase the capacities of digital surveillance even more.

Deregulation reduced government’s enforcement of existing labor laws and creation of new ones. Corporate influence also ensures that businesses will have a free hand to intensify work, no matter the health and safety consequences. Federal wage-and-hour inspectors are so underfunded that you can expect your workplace to be inspected, on average, less than once every 67 years. And America’s ragged social safety net makes many workers take jobs that work them sick.
Deregulation in the financial sector is also driving short staffing. When private equity firms buy companies like Verizon in Maine or Burger King, they strip companies’ assets while pushing workers to maintain their service levels, often with a reduced workforce. The drive for short-term profits intensifies short staffing even more.

Pushing Back

Workers’ resistance to speed-ups is as old and persistent as U.S. capitalism. It is also becoming as widespread. Even union-phobic Amazon is seeing union organizing drives erupt in warehouses across the country. Amazon’s “staff turnover rate is astronomical. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually,” The Guardian reported in 2022. An internal memo expressed management fears that the company would run out of available workers, since it employs almost 1% of the U.S. workforce. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the company had to “do a better job” and would commit to being “Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.” But U.S. workers probably shouldn’t wait for Bezos to fulfill that promise. What are their alternatives?

Government is a key battleground for workers. We need to strengthen unionization rights and workplace standards so workers have the power to resist short staffing. Building a social safety net is essential, too. Short staffing is only profitable because corporations are outsourcing its costs—illness, injuries, stress, and adverse impacts on families. Higher corporate taxes could shift some of those costs back to where they originated, and a strong social safety net would give working people the space to look around for better jobs.

Expanding workplace rights and social safety nets doesn’t seem realistic right now. But today’s attacks on workers only prove how deeply we need to make government work for us.

The battle of ideas is another important front. Ideological campaigns helped CEOs, wealth-holders, and wealth-managers bust unions, deregulate the economy, shift to short-term profit-taking, slash public services, and shift wealth and power upward.

Workplace organizing, though, is where change starts and ends. Unions and nonunion workers can build power by organizing for health and safety, which means combatting short staffing. Working at Amazon for over a year has taken a toll, San Francisco warehouse worker Dori Goldberg told Labor Notes. “I often go home with pinched nerves,” Goldberg said. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a sore back. And when I get home from work, I have no energy to do anything else.”

“And I’m sick and tired of that—literally sick and tired of being sick and tired all the time. I’m motivated to organize because I want to be able to live my life outside of work and have a good-
quality job where I am not overextended.”

Mike Prokosch is a carpenter and popular economics educator in Boston. He is also a member of the Dollars & Sense board.

Sources: Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso, 2012); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2016); Maine Department of Labor, Barriers to employment: Key findings from recent survey effort, September 2021 (maine.gov/labor); James Myall, “State of Working Maine 2023: Boosting Maine’s Workforce,” Maine Center for Economic Policy, November 20, 2023 (mecep.org); Andy O’Brien, “IBEW Leaders, Golden & Pingree Blast Consolidated Communications for Layoffs & Subcontracting,” Maine AFL-CIO, February 29, 2024 (maineaflcio.org); Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther And The Fate Of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995); Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Cornell University Press, 2003); Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2016); Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2003); Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997); Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (Little, Brown and Company, 2019); The Energy Project and Harvard Business Review, “The Human Era @ Work,” 2014 (uli.org); Senator Bob Casey, “A Special Report on Greedflation: How Corporations Are Making Record Profits on the Backs of American Families,” November 2023 (casey.senate.gov); Luis Feliz Leon, “A National Movement to Organize Amazon Takes Off,” Labor Notes, October 4, 2024 (labornotes.org).