In most food processing operations, just getting the right people in the right jobs is difficult enough. In union environments you have all the challenges of crewing and also must honor the constraints of a union contract. Contracts usually include language that addresses the senior employees right-to-work, preferences for either shifts, jobs, highest paying jobs, or all three, drafting for overtime, and many other requirements that bear on workforce scheduling.

Its not union rules alone that make workforce scheduling so difficult. When union rules are combined with changing production runs or with crewing systems that rotate employees through shifts and jobs over days and weeks, the scheduling process becomes very complex. Given their best effort, the human scheduler, if they can keep up at all, can not apply the rules consistently and fairly. The number of variables - seniority, job preferences, qualifications, absence conditions, rotations, etc. - are just too great. In the push-and-shove of getting product out the door, rules are often enforced unevenly or stretched outright.

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