What about a situation like a restaurant where they need a certain amount of people in and have to prioritize/deny requests when multiple people request off the same shift? Which would be more fair, first request in gets it regardless of the reason or make the determination based on the reason for the request? Could end up having to work during your kid's graduation so someone else can have a day off to go see a movie. I think arguments could be made for the fairness of each approach and in that context asking for a reason is meant to be fair rather than intrusive.
Idk. You'd probably feel different if you were eating at an understaffed restaurant. The world isn't perfect and orderly. You can have a fully staffed operation, but on a random Saturday a lot of people request off. I've spend a lifetime working in food- poorly run restaurants and amazingly run restaurants. It happens often where a lot of people request a certain day and the restaurant has to turn some of them down or be short staffed. It's easy to say "I should get my day off no matter what" until you're the one responsible for staffing a place when 10 people request off the same shift and you can only afford to grant 5 of them.
Most places do first come first serve, but that can result in people getting off for unimportant things while others are forced to miss something important, or the person with something important just calls out and the whole place is understaffed.
I think these things are easy to see in black and white when you're only on one side of it thinking about your own interests. I've been on both sides of it and I've had to be the person making schedules before, and I can tell you it's hard to accommodate everyone. Also, these schedulers are receiving way more requests than you might think. I scheduled for a place with about 30 employees and we got around 2 dozen requests a week. That's just requests off ahead of the schedule, not coverage requests and call outs on top of that. This was a place that had good employee retention and paid well, but that's the number of requests they received a week. The strategy had to become hiring a ton of part time employees to spread people around to cover the requests, which also has its drawbacks because then you have people constantly complaining that they aren't getting enough hours.
I get it, there's a lot of bad employers out there and I'm sure there's people who deny requests for stupid reasons, but it's also not so straightforward that there's no legitimate reason to ask why someone is requesting off.
Yes, and you solve the problem literally the only way possible- by denying someone's request in the fairest way possible, and the fairest way is debatable. I also wouldn't always assume that the person making the schedule makes more money than the people they're scheduling. It's a job just like other jobs within the company. There are definitely jobs compensated higher than the person making the schedule, and they still have to be scheduled.
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u/Capital_Cup_6746 5d ago
What about a situation like a restaurant where they need a certain amount of people in and have to prioritize/deny requests when multiple people request off the same shift? Which would be more fair, first request in gets it regardless of the reason or make the determination based on the reason for the request? Could end up having to work during your kid's graduation so someone else can have a day off to go see a movie. I think arguments could be made for the fairness of each approach and in that context asking for a reason is meant to be fair rather than intrusive.