BU 217 Unit 5 stakeholder analysis example

Two Eight-Hour Shifts to Round-the-Clock Twelves: A Stakeholder Analysis of a Georgia Poultry Plant's Schedule Change, Down to the Daycare Pickup

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 217: Business Ethics and the Legal Environment

Instructor Name

February 12, 2026

Two Eight-Hour Shifts to Round-the-Clock Twelves: A Stakeholder Analysis of a Georgia Poultry Plant's Schedule Change, Down to the Daycare Pickup

The Decision

Northfork Poultry is a composite processing plant in rural north Georgia employing 640 production workers on two eight-hour shifts, Monday through Friday. A national grocery chain has offered a three-year contract that would raise volume by 40% but requires production seven days a week. Management proposes replacing the current schedule with four crews on 12-hour rotating shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., on a pattern that alternates three-day and four-day workweeks. The decision is whether to adopt that schedule on April 1.

The Stakeholders, Specifically

Each party is named as narrowly as the facts allow, with what it stands to gain or lose, and interest and influence recorded separately.

Reading the Map

Plotting the parties by interest and influence shows where the decision's risks concentrate. The grocery chain and the owners have high interest and high influence and will largely get what they want. Federal inspectors have moderate interest but high influence: federal rules require inspection during processing, and inspection outside a plant's approved basic workweek is provided as overtime service billed to the plant (9 C.F.R. § 307.5), so the new schedule adds a real cost and requires the inspection office's cooperation. The largest group with the most at stake, the day-shift parents, has high interest and little influence, and the households on County Road 12 are in the same position. Stakeholder theory warns that parties with strong claims but weak power are the ones most easily left out of a decision, even when their claims are legitimate (Mitchell et al., 1997).

The Argument: What the Company Owes Those With Little Influence

The company can adopt the schedule without the day-shift parents' agreement, and the law does not require it to solve their childcare problem. But the stakeholder view the course applies holds that a firm's managers owe consideration to all parties their decisions substantially affect, not only to those who can press their claims (Freeman, 1984). Two groups bear most of the cost of a decision whose gains go mostly to others: the parents, whose day now ends after daycare closes, and the neighbors, whose nights now include trucks.

For the parents, the cost is countable: about one hour a day of care to arrange on each workday, roughly 15 to 16 days a month. At a local sitter rate of about $15 an hour, that is around $230 a month per affected worker, against overtime pay that, for a worker earning $17 an hour, comes to about $400 a month: 16 overtime hours at time and a half. Many workers will come out ahead financially; some, particularly single parents without family nearby, will not be able to make the schedule work at all. For the neighbors, the cost is noise and safety on a rural road at night, which no pay offsets.

Recommendation

Adopt the 12-hour schedule, but with three conditions that address the parties with high interest and low influence. First, before assigning crews, let workers bid on crews by seniority and set aside a limited number of early-shift positions ending by 2 p.m. in packaging, where the work allows it, for parents who cannot arrange evening care. Second, negotiate with the local daycare center to extend its hours to 7 p.m., with the plant paying the added staffing cost, estimated at about $60,000 a year, less than 2% of the added profit. Third, route night trucks through the east entrance on the state highway and meet with the County Road 12 households before April 1. These conditions cost a small fraction of the contract's value and reduce the risk that the schedule drives out experienced workers, which would hurt the owners too.

What Would Change the Recommendation

The recommendation rests on assumptions that could prove wrong, and the analysis should say which ones. If the crew bidding showed that more than about a quarter of day-shift parents could not work the new hours even with extended daycare, the plant would risk losing experienced workers faster than it could train replacements, and a hybrid schedule, 12-hour shifts on weekends only with 8-hour shifts during the week, would deserve a closer look despite its higher supervision cost. If the federal inspection office could not staff nights and weekends without long delays, the schedule could not run as planned regardless of the workers. And if the grocery chain's contract proved shorter or less certain than three years, the case for asking workers and neighbors to absorb these costs would weaken considerably. The plant should confirm all three points before April 1, because each involves a stakeholder whose cooperation the schedule cannot do without.

References

Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Pitman.

Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853-886. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9711022105

Overtime and holiday inspection service, 9 C.F.R. § 307.5 (2025).