Home › Not in policing? › Plant and manufacturing
A shift calendar for plant and manufacturing crews
Continuous operations run the longest cycles of any industry — twenty-eight days is common and the pattern rarely lines up with a week. These are exactly the rotations worth saving once and never working out by hand again.
Why the week stops meaning anything
Continuous plant does not run in weeks. It runs in cycles of fourteen or twenty-eight days, and once your rotation is longer than seven days the calendar on the wall stops describing your life. The agreements say so in their own arithmetic.
“The base pay of employees under our current Agreement is based on a 42 hour work week... Under the 12-hour shift schedule the employee will still average 42 hours of work per week, but in each pay period he will receive the equivalent of 98 hours of straight pay... The total hours worked are 84 hours and the total hours of straight time pay are 98 hours. In a two week period you will work the same amount of hours (84).”
Eighty-four hours in a fortnight is seven twelve-hour shifts. Forty-two hours a week is what that averages to — and no week actually contains forty-two hours. Some weeks you work three shifts and some you work four; on a DuPont cycle one week is seventy-two hours and the next is none at all. The average is an accounting fact, not a description of any week you will ever live.
International Union of Operating Engineers Local 351, twelve-hour shift exhibit to the collective bargaining agreement, published by the Local. Checked 3 September 2026.
The long cycles, drawn
The DuPont runs twenty-eight days: four days, three off, three nights, one off, three days, three off, four nights, then seven consecutive days off. The continental and the southern swing rotate faster and rest shorter. Whichever your site runs, the point is the same — the pattern does not come back round for a month, so nothing about it repeats weekly and none of it fits a calendar built on weeks.
Days and nights, marked apart
A rotation that flips you from days to nights halfway through is the one thing a plain calendar app cannot show at all. Here each day carries its own marker, so a night block reads as nights and the turnaround between them is visible before you agree to anything on it.
The hours on top
Callouts, turnarounds, covering a shift on your days off — logged against the hours and the rate, separately from the cycle, so the overtime that pays for the year is a record rather than a memory.
What to switch off
The police categories and directories can be renamed, hidden or removed. What is left is the rotation and what you worked around it.
The rotations this usually means
Whichever of these your employer runs, the cycle is drawn out day by day so you can check it against your own roster before you save it.
DuPont
Twenty-eight days, four nights in a row, a full week off at the end.
Sunday to Saturday, and the strip begins on the same day the calendar beside it does.
Day shiftNight shift24-hour tourDay off
Set the template once. Your days show up on every month after it.
September 2026
Continental
Days, evenings and nights in two-day blocks.
Sunday to Saturday, and the strip begins on the same day the calendar beside it does.
Day shiftNight shift24-hour tourDay off
Set the template once. Your days show up on every month after it.
September 2026
4 on 4 off
The simplest of the continuous rotations.
16 cycle days, reading across the same as the calendar beside it. This pattern walks, so it lands on different weekdays each time round.
Day shiftNight shift24-hour tourDay off
Set the template once. Your days show up on every month after it.
September 2026
Built for police. Works for any rotation.
The law-enforcement side switches off. The rotation engine and the record of what you earned do not care what you do for a living.
Scan to install
