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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

To the Editor:great exception to your article, "Scheduled Programming" (SN, Oct. 2, 1995). Nowhere in the entire article are the skills, education or training of individual workers taken into consideration when discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of computerized work scheduling.It is people who do the work, not computer key strokes. A happy, well-trained work force is going to be much more productive

To the Editor:

great exception to your article, "Scheduled Programming" (SN, Oct. 2, 1995). Nowhere in the entire article are the skills, education or training of individual workers taken into consideration when discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of computerized work scheduling.

It is people who do the work, not computer key strokes. A happy, well-trained work force is going to be much more productive than one which is not, and no computer scheduling program is going to make that change.

It seems to us that an employer with the most sophisticated computer scheduling system yet developed is not going to be any further ahead if that system is simply slotting in unhappy, poorly trained and poorly managed workers as are depicted in the graphic accompanying this misleading article.

Computerized scheduling is not the end-all, be-all solution your article would make it out to be. First comes the development and training of productive workers who enjoy their jobs and are treated fairly, then an employer has someone worth scheduling.

Employers would be well advised to take a long hard look at how they train and treat the people they employ before they worry about how to schedule them.

-- JACK ALLARD secretary treasurer United Food and Commercial Workers of British Columbia, Local 1518 Burnaby, B.C.