Point to a workplace where employees are not cross-trained to back up one another so that staffing is organized as efficiently as possible - and we will show you a business in trouble.
Except if you are pointing to government.
There, job protection is the primary concern - not efficiency, not cost-effectiveness. We cite complaints from the union that county CSEA employees at the South and Center Sewer District are being asked to work out of their job title, as they put it.
We notice no one complained employees are too busy to do the work. Indeed, it does not matter whether the employees have the time. What matters is that job-protecting strictures written into public employee union contracts and other work rules make it impossible for the workforce and the workload to be scheduled and managed with a degree of efficiency that taxpayers deserve.
Simply put, government employee contracts and politically motivated civil service regulations prevent employees of an operation like the South and Center Sewer Chautauqua Lake Sewer District from being part of a team doing what needs to be done to keep the operation viable and efficient. Even if they wanted to, their union would try to put a stop to it.
That is something to remember, by the way, as the public employee union mounts arguments against selling the money-losing, local taxpayer-subsidized county nursing home.
Taxpayers are not the only losers here. Some of the work at the sewer district was assigned "outside their job title" with an expectation that the worker could learn new skills in order to qualify for promotion.
Only in a union-dominated public-sector workplace is that a bad thing.
As long as government continues to operate under strictures rejected by the private sector ages ago, everyone - employees and the public alike - will continue to suffer the consequences.