It was not too many years ago that pretty much only the North American auto plants and a skeleton crew at the hospital worked the graveyard shift. As an engineer in a three shift auto plant you would expect to end working the graveyard shift on a regular basis. You do not expect to run into rush hour traffic on your way into work at that time. The first time I ran into Toronto traffic on the way to work on the graveyard shift, I dismissed it as an accident. When you consistently run into rush hour traffic after midnight you realize that the city has become a 24 hour city.
In the current economy the largest cites are where the new employment is being generated. Cities like New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, New Delhi, Jakarta, Tokyo are all 24 hour cities. As the worker becomes a smaller part of the business cost, the shift premium that you need to pay to get workers on shifts other than day shift is insignificant compared to the increased utilization of the capital invested in automation. Even in engineering the advent of high annual cost CAD seats has converted a day shift occupation into a multi-shift occupation.
This is not a new phenomenon. New York City, when it was the transit point for immigrants arriving in America, became a 24 hour city. It was not uncommon in the tenements for night shift workers to share a bed with day shift workers. Severe shortages of housing units in Asian cities like Beijing, have generated an echo of the tenements that we saw in New York City. I hope that our race to bottom wage levels does not bring that type of thing back here. It always comes back with a twist. I was reading about a successful entrepreneur who was renting camper vans to Silicon Valley residents who ended up living in their employers parking lots.
Explosive growth comes with its own problems. Ever increasing numbers of goods must be transported into 24 hour cities. The traffic snarl causes trucks to be outlawed during daylight hours. Everyone who is a truck driver is pushed onto the grave
yard shift. Even this drastic step may not be enough. We hear stories of week long traffic jams on the routes into Beijing. Yes increasing the number of TEU (transport equivalent units) that a container ship may carry to over 10,000, is necessary to deliver enough goods to support a city like New York. I can imagine 10,000 trucks backed up all the way to Pennsylvania the day that one of the cranes in the Port of New York craps out.