© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group In spite of the obvious impact that decisions on workforce planning have on the capacity of a production system, they are rarely mentioned in strategic capacity planning literature. This paper analyses the implications of embodying decisions on work shifts in strategic capacity planning and proposes a mathematical programming model that allows treating any type of relationship between the intensity in the use of the production equipment and maintenance and variable production costs. A computational experiment shows that the model can be solved in acceptable computing times for moderate values of the number of types of equipment and of work shifts. Using the model, the optimal solutions for diverse scenarios are presented and compared with those obtained under the assumption that the work shifts must be kept invariable over the entire horizon.