I've worked night shift for pretty much my whole adult life, at several different jobs. I know that overwhelmingly in my experience night shift is full of slackers. I totally don't have a problem with this, I am often the slacker, but only to a point. I make sure I get all of my work done and if I do sleep it's on rare occasions, like at most once a month, and I set alarms to wake up every tenish minutes just to make sure I'm not missing anything. This is my first nightshift job where I'm working with other people during the night.
So to the point- my shift manager sleeps through about half of every shift. And this isn't like sleeping in a back office, ready to go if anything happens, this is him going out to the parking garage and sleeping in his car for 3-4 hours every night (literally), and he usually won't even answer his phone. We do a tip share per shift so he's getting half of all the tips I collect while he gets to sleep. He's never offered to let me go and take a break in my car, which is the main point that bothers me. He is pretty relaxed however, and whenever I ask to take a smoke break or go grab a cup of coffee or to run to my car, etc he tells me to “go do your thing”. He doesn't care if I sit around in general and he often encourages me to work less (which I appreciate but I get bored just waiting around all night).
He's also big in our union and the only other person I know to rep the union hard. I definitely have it easier under him than I would with someone else and it's not even like he's leaving me with a ton of work, the four hours of the shift he misses is maybe 20 minutes of actual work but a lot of just being present. I've tried talking to him about it before but he's very… Disinterested. I don't think he doesn't like me, per se, but we're very different people and after like my third shift it was evident we just don't share like anything in common to talk about and all I get is one word responses.