the.com/skeleton staff
The minimum humans required before a business legally becomes a ghost town.
means The smallest possible crew kept on hand to keep a place technically running — everyone else sent home.
from From "skeleton" used since the 1700s-1800s to mean a bare outline or framework of something, stripped to its essentials, like bones without flesh. A "skeleton staff" or "skeleton crew" applies that image literally: all the fleshy extras (most of the workers) stripped away, leaving only the bare structural minimum needed to keep the body — the business — from collapsing entirely.
- origin
- 1800s term for bare-bones military or office crews
- irony
- named after bones, yet somehow always overworked
- holiday use
- peaks on christmas eve and bank holidays
- modern version
- one intern and a slack notification