The Challenge of Hiring Casual Labour, Part-Time. Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako

I have two days off in a row. The boss and another employee are going in today to make dough-balls.

Tomorrow, a service technician will be coming in, for roughly one hour, to service our mixing machine. This means I will not be able to do the usual tally in my typical four-hour shot. It’s a part-time job. I have a bad back, to the extent that I actually get a small, provincial disability pension. The pension pays the rent, the job buys the groceries and some other small luxuries. 

Like a half-decent vehicle, for example.

We have a problem, in that while sales volume has slowed on its usual, seasonal basis, for the most part, one guy does eighty to ninety percent of all production.

I have thought about getting someone else in there. Here’s the problem. Even with three or four of us going in during the busy season, all working part-time, if you add up all those hours, it represents barely one, full-time job. It’s also a physical job, as a sack of flour weighs twenty kilos or forty-four pounds.

The location is also out in the country. What I would like to see would be a mature adult, one with their own transportation, and an ability to work on their own. They’d be getting $14.00-$15.00 per hour, cash, with basically no other benefits. It’s casual labour, all the way. 

And yet, they would still have to have their own key. They would have to have some kind of personal discipline…I need to be able to trust them with our business and our premises.

And at that point, someone has to train them. Someone has to supervise them. They could, conceivably, be doing eighty to ninety percent of all production…and I know how that feels, physically, mentally, psychologically.

In summer, I might get somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two or three hours a week. In winter, that can go as low as eleven to maybe fifteen hours a week. When you think about it, there’s not that many hours of work there to begin with—one of the reasons I go in for four hours, is all that driving. It’s not worth going in for two hours, that’s only thirty bucks and it’s still the same drive-time. It’s still the same wear-and-tear on the vehicle. I still have to do the same paperwork. With set-up time and clean-up time, it is much less efficient. The labour cost per load goes up, and the math is pretty simple.

With an employee, someone would still have to go in once in a while, just to make sure the garbage has been taken out—routine but important jobs like counting how many bags of flour, sugar, and salt are left.

Someone would still have to call the customer and the distributor, and quite frankly, keep the employee honest. If someone says they’re going in to work Tuesday morning, for four hours, and they plan on doing seven loads, then I would really need to know that it had actually been done. I don’t need surprises. When I do it myself, I know it has been done.

Now, we’re not talking twenty-three hours per week in summer. We’re talking some additional hours, in training, in supervision, in just keeping an eye on things. Our labour costs must, inevitably, go up. As it is, I work on an hourly basis. I make so much a week, a month or in a year. I train my own replacement, and give up so much in earnings. I’d still be waking up at five in the morning—the habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and yet now, I wouldn’t have anything to do. I would have nowhere to go, no real purpose to the day.

While I would like the help, in order to hire someone else, I have to give up enough hours or we’re training them to go in for what, two, three or four hours a week; certainly in winter. At some level, it’s no more worth it for them than it is for me.

This is why I’ve never really pushed for it. (In summer, we do get some help, we scramble, and we somehow make it through.)

And, for the next four days, bearing in mind last week’s order, it really will be some kind of a challenge.

***

Part of the job is washing totes, basically big plastic bins we use to ship our product. No one likes washing totes. So, I figured if no one else wants to do it, then these are my hours from now on. To wash thirty totes would take at least a half an hour, right? And after a while, no one washed totes any more.

This is how I made myself indispensable. No one else but the boss and I have ever called the customer, the distributor, or delivered to the customer. The other people were afraid to get too involved, maybe—oh, they’d take the money for a few hours, but otherwise, they remained unengaged with the business. Getting them in there in the first place was like pulling teeth from an alligator. I don’t know if this is typical, but it’s a family business, which often presents unique challenges.

At some point, I will be writing rent checks and paying the water bill—if I’m lucky, or if I ain’t careful, or something like that.

If I’m not careful, I will end up owning the place.

The last thing I ever expected was to become some kind of a fucking success.

END

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.

Thank you for reading.