Blog Post 7: Team production with gift exchange
My personal experience with team production with gift exchange is with a common phenomenon, shift swapping. The summer after I had graduated from high school, I was working as a lifeguard at a very unorganized pool. The pool had past problems with employees shift swapping and had technically banned the process. However, they didn't officially regulate this. As long as five guards showed up for every shift, no head guards checked who was supposed to be on duty. So, as long as your substitute showed up for the shift, you were in the clear.
A big issue then became that the shift swapping was based solely on a trust system. There was no official schedule change or book of shifts swapped with signatures, like at other places that I had worked. If the person that you swapped with didn't show up, you had no way to prove the agreement or back it up. As a result you would be written up, placed on probation or fired depending on how many times it happened. A second issue was then that the other person would still receive the pay for the hours you worked, so it became necessary for an actual shift swap to occur where an equal number of hours were traded so that both employees came out of the trade even.
This combination of complications made for an interesting phenomenon. The majority of the people working at this pool were only summer employees and most were only planning to work there that year and then probably never again (the pay was average, the bosses were demanding and it was a relatively boring job). This led to a steep decline in the quality of work starting at the end of July. From employees not showing up to shifts, to showing up late or even intoxicated on a few occasions. While these declines in quality ranged from amusing to frustrating, where I noticed them most was in the black market shift swapping.
I first noticed this in mid-July when a coworker was in desperate need of having her shift covered, but seemed reluctant to cover one of mine before hers. At the time I remember thinking that she was probably just busy and stressed. We eventually agreed to have her cover a shift of mine about a week after I covered hers. I was a bit surprised and angry when I got a call from the head guard the afternoon that she was supposed to cover my shift asking where I was and why I hadn't showed up to work on time. I then proceeded to lose an hour of pay and get written up, while the girl received her full pay and didn't end up having to come in to work for a full day.
This process of shift swapping, but making sure that you covered the second shift (and didn't show up), became a very common con for the rest of the summer. It got so bad that in August people began to stop trading shifts, including an incident where a girl was signed up to work an entire week that she was away for a grandparent's funeral in Florida. This resulted in even more skipped shifts and a complete breakdown of what little trust was between the guards. In the end, the employees lost all of the benefits that came with shift swapping and the pool itself had even more skipped shifts, making everyone worse off.
A big issue then became that the shift swapping was based solely on a trust system. There was no official schedule change or book of shifts swapped with signatures, like at other places that I had worked. If the person that you swapped with didn't show up, you had no way to prove the agreement or back it up. As a result you would be written up, placed on probation or fired depending on how many times it happened. A second issue was then that the other person would still receive the pay for the hours you worked, so it became necessary for an actual shift swap to occur where an equal number of hours were traded so that both employees came out of the trade even.
This combination of complications made for an interesting phenomenon. The majority of the people working at this pool were only summer employees and most were only planning to work there that year and then probably never again (the pay was average, the bosses were demanding and it was a relatively boring job). This led to a steep decline in the quality of work starting at the end of July. From employees not showing up to shifts, to showing up late or even intoxicated on a few occasions. While these declines in quality ranged from amusing to frustrating, where I noticed them most was in the black market shift swapping.
I first noticed this in mid-July when a coworker was in desperate need of having her shift covered, but seemed reluctant to cover one of mine before hers. At the time I remember thinking that she was probably just busy and stressed. We eventually agreed to have her cover a shift of mine about a week after I covered hers. I was a bit surprised and angry when I got a call from the head guard the afternoon that she was supposed to cover my shift asking where I was and why I hadn't showed up to work on time. I then proceeded to lose an hour of pay and get written up, while the girl received her full pay and didn't end up having to come in to work for a full day.
This process of shift swapping, but making sure that you covered the second shift (and didn't show up), became a very common con for the rest of the summer. It got so bad that in August people began to stop trading shifts, including an incident where a girl was signed up to work an entire week that she was away for a grandparent's funeral in Florida. This resulted in even more skipped shifts and a complete breakdown of what little trust was between the guards. In the end, the employees lost all of the benefits that came with shift swapping and the pool itself had even more skipped shifts, making everyone worse off.
It would have been good for you to somehow connect your story to one or more of the articles you were to read. I didn't see an obvious connection in regard to the shift swapping you mention. That doesn't seem like gift exchange to me, because there is an obvious quid pro quo the way you told the story. Did it ever happen where somebody would just take an additional shift on behalf of somebody else? Doing that would be more like gift exchange.
ReplyDeleteI see your point about the articles, but I didn't think that my example related well to any of them. I suppose I could have used some of the terminology and pointed out the differences in what happened in my example and what they had found, but I thought that my example was an interesting look at how gift exchange had failed instead of how it is an innate feature in most humans (and primates). I wouldn't say that I directly followed the prompt in this post, but did something similar and took it in a different direction.
DeleteIn the end there definitely isn't gift exchange, the exact opposite in fact. I thought that it was interesting how eventually the benefit of having the extra free shift as a one time benefit outweighed the future benefit of possible real shift swaps. I was actually hoping that you might have a theory on why this happened.
The original shift swap that I discussed was gift exchange, because of the timing of the hours worked, one person benefitted from moving their schedule while another person was at best neutral and possible inconvenienced.
Your situation was very peculiar to some of the other posts I have read. It seems that in your case you got taken advantage of. The way your shift swapping ended up playing out everyone ended up deciding to act opportunistically instead of cooperating. I think the major reason for this turn of events is the fact your job didn't regulate shift swapping. In all the jobs I have worked the shift swap was regulated and offered, but up to the workers to find their substitute. In a situation where you can't rely on your job backing up someone covering your shift I can see why it ended up causing your pool loads of problems. I wonder if the person who took advantage of you only did so because of the rules of your pool.
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