My last job was like this weird combination of both. We were in a food packaging plant with heavy machinery active all the time and no air conditioning (so like 100+ degrees at all times) doing hard manual labor for a total of like 2.5h each 8h shift. My direct supervisors didn’t really give a shit if we were doing anything for the rest of the time, but we still had to either hide or pretend to work for the rest of the time, and we absolutely could not make any mistakes about it whatsoever. like you might literally be sitting around with nothing to do from 10 to 2, but if 2:02 comes around and you’re still not doing anything but across the entire facility some work finally opened up at 1:59 well you’re gonna have a fuckin meeting where they shout and threaten to fire you and accuse you of being lazy and shit

have they considered actually doing their jobs as supervisors and letting us know when work opens up? no. of course not. we’ve just gotta know.

absolutely fucked

edit: just to spell it out as well (because its so ridiculous) they literally just expected us to be walking circles around the facility with a broom in hand for hours on end. that way we’d know when finally there was something to do. :agony-shivering: