Shift Work Needs To Die

During my career in the wastewater treatment industry I have worked every conceivable shift. Nights, afternoons, compressed schedules, and the list goes on and on. You know what? They all sucked. And you know what else? It’s terrible on the health of your employees if you think it is a good idea to have them work rotating shifts or extended periods on nights. I’ve worked a schedule of one week on nights, one week on days, one week on afternoons. So the boss thought he’d be generous and offer us monthly rotations instead. It didn’t help. Do you realize how absolutely devasting that is on the human body? I’m not going to go on here and quote studies but you can easily look up all cause mortality rates related to night shift workers. It’s statistically higher. So where am I going with all this? Reevaluate the organization’s structure and determine if you actually need 24/7 staffing at your facility. Now hear me out here… I get it there are some facilities that absolutely do need to have three shifts of operators. However, I also know that there are places that do not and said operators are just sitting around most the night doing rounds and housekeeping work. Which is fine but I hardly think it is financially justified and I don’t think it is worth the long term health of the individuals involved.

Story time. I worked a very large wastewater plant (hint hint, the one in the picture above) that had a mass exodus of employees all at once. It had been run for years with three shifts of operators. Guess what happened when those people retired and they were unable to fill those positions? They made do and went to minimal staffing. And guess what? It ran just fine. There are obvious cost savings here by having less employees on staff, but that isn’t necessarily what this article is about. It’s about saving employees from long term health issues of having to work nights for years or even worse, some sort of rotating shift. I can see very few reasons in modern times to have that many people workings nights. The exception to this would be a few operators doing some sort of dewatering process and even that is mostly automated nowadays.

The instrumentation and automation that these facilities are capable of having is spectacular. We can monitor in real time virtually every aspect of our plants including the water quality of the effluent. We can have amazing redundancy, alarms, and safeguards in place to prevent any major issues that an operator could address if he were on site. Gone are the days when you needed a full shift of operators to turn valves manually and do other processes by hand. Most of the heavy lifting can be done during the day and the night can just cruise with minimal staffing or none at all. I would argue that almost everything could be solved by an on-call employee that could then call in other employees to respond to emergencies.

Since I’m an operator and I’m solution orientated and want to offer something of value instead of just ranting, I’d suggest larger plants take note of what smaller plants already do. Invest in proper infrastructure and technology that alarms and can call in employees in as needed. With the rise of AI and everything else going on in the world, this technology is only going to get better. You can monitor and alarm virtually every process and parameter in your facility if you wanted to, so why keep employees on nights when it is detrimental to their health? We constantly talk about attracting people to the industry but really the only offer is you get to work nights for ten years and maybe you’ll get a day shift position if it opens up. Sounds like a solid career path for someone when they can go work in another industry for comparable pay and not have to work with human waste. That’s the point of this whole article. If we ever want to move this industry forward and attract and keep people we need to reevaluate how we do things, and this is one area that is long over do. We can invest in the proper technology and automate a lot of what goes on at night and truly invest in our employees on day shifts. It saves money, it saves lives, and just makes sense. I am aware there are absolutely places that need someone on site at night. The point is, we should make sure it is absolutely necessary if we want to attract more people to the industry.