[red-beard]

Yes, but, your wage per hour would remain the same, possibly lower. So your yearly pay will go down.

Productivity is a crap shoot. If you run 4 shifts per day at 6 hours per day, there are losses for change over. OTOH, productivity may increase since the workforce should be "fresher".

The labor cost will go up, since the benefits will now be given to more people. Healthcare, retirement, etc, make up a significant portion of labor costs. And it will probably be easier to hit OT, since you only need to exceed 30 hours per week.

Also all of these new people would need to be trained, which is costly.

Finally, are there sufficient people to do this? At my last company, they could not find enough code certified welders in Oklahoma City. They hired lots of guys to do the non-code stuff and then tried to train the some to become code certified. The problem was that not all of the non-code guys had what it takes to become code certified.

A lot of the chronic unemployment in this country is from people who are not able to be retrained to the newer types of jobs. The lower level jobs have been moved to places where they can be done for overall lower costs (Wages/Taxes/Work Rules/Environmental rules).