I didn't mean "slack" as in "free time because there isn't anything to do"; I meant "slack" as in "extra tolerance because—at a given wage—an average employee will predictably goof off X% of the time."
This is how all large chains (McDonalds, WalMart, etc.) are managed from a corporate perspective. Instead of paying X salary to ensure enough "morale" for optimal worker productivity, it is actually more cost-effective to pay workers a lower wage such that they're sub-optimally productive—but still productive—and then put systems in place to both idiot-proof and peer-quality-check each employee's output, such that the output is still guaranteed even with multiple "malfunctioning" process-nodes potentially touching it.
The epitome of this approach is seen in how an "automatic" Amazon Mechanical Turk work pipeline operates at scale: a program hands off work-items to workers, and then treats each individual work-product as being of unknown quality, handing it off to further workers to give a quality-judgement to it, cross-checking those workers' opinions in case some of them are just mashing "good", etc. None of this would be necessary if the work paid well-enough for market-forces to apply (i.e. if people would want to compete for the work.) But since it doesn't pay, people aren't interested in one-upping one-another's quality to steal the job, so you just end up with whoever decided to wander in.
See also: the economic "Losers" in the MacLeod Hierarchy.
This is how all large chains (McDonalds, WalMart, etc.) are managed from a corporate perspective. Instead of paying X salary to ensure enough "morale" for optimal worker productivity, it is actually more cost-effective to pay workers a lower wage such that they're sub-optimally productive—but still productive—and then put systems in place to both idiot-proof and peer-quality-check each employee's output, such that the output is still guaranteed even with multiple "malfunctioning" process-nodes potentially touching it.
The epitome of this approach is seen in how an "automatic" Amazon Mechanical Turk work pipeline operates at scale: a program hands off work-items to workers, and then treats each individual work-product as being of unknown quality, handing it off to further workers to give a quality-judgement to it, cross-checking those workers' opinions in case some of them are just mashing "good", etc. None of this would be necessary if the work paid well-enough for market-forces to apply (i.e. if people would want to compete for the work.) But since it doesn't pay, people aren't interested in one-upping one-another's quality to steal the job, so you just end up with whoever decided to wander in.
See also: the economic "Losers" in the MacLeod Hierarchy.