Am I right? - this is not his job?

[Diedre44]

DH works a Summer/Winter months shift pattern - picture attached.
Has had an email at work today saying basically if your holidays fall on a 5pm finish in the summer months that you/he has to get that covered.
WTAF? Is this standard practice? I've never had to arrange cover for A/L in any job, maybe the odd short notice day etc but never for A/L.
My take is it's not his job to do this.

Where I work you're paired up with someone so if I want annual leave I have to ask if the other person is available to cover and vice versa. If not you can't take leave. This is because I'm the only person in my department who does my job so it's not easily covered.
Are your husband's work suggesting something like this?

Does he have any way of arranging this cover? I would reply formally by email saying that I don't have authorisation or access to staff's phone numbers/office systems and so I can't see how this would be possible. Are they actually asking for him to make sure that someone is aware that he is off that day so they know to eg lock the park gates at dusk? That is different to booking people into a day/night shift.

So he effectively works from home. He is a Gas Engineer for a large but local company. They have a base but there work is pre-loaded daily on a hand held unit. They're a team of around 8 (iirc). It just feels off. He's been there many years and there are so many changes being implemented what feels like daily lately. The guys don't see each other apart from the odd "team meeting" but tbh they would not go out of their way for each other.

Yes, it sounds like he doesn't have any way of arranging this cover. He just needs to feed back to his boss that this isn't possible. Imagine if he 'booked' someone to cover for him for a fortnight's holiday and then the company said that they didn't have any work needed to be done - who would pay the wage bill for hours your DH booked? I'm sure he can think of a bunch of problems that could be caused. This needs to be thought through and a clear policy shared with staff. If he doesn't understand what he is being asked then the communication has failed.

I just can't imagine that somebody who has just done their week of 5pm finishes would agree to do another following on when they should be on an 8-3 shift and sacrifice their 1pm Friday finish for anyone else - DH included. It's a very "each for their own" mentality.