I appreciate the quick response and your logic is virtually the same as mine. But I'm not sure that where statement is going to work in my scenario. Each Job assignment is for one day, so a given worker will have numerous job assignment records all (or all but one) of which will be <> requested date. I think your where statement will show all those records except for the record where that person is assigned on the requested date which would be a fatal error for the system. I need to be able to return a list of people_ids that have not been assigned and therefore have no record for that date.
My current line of thinking is to get a list of all workers then a second list of all workers assigned on that date and eliminate them from the first list leaving only available workers, but I'm not sure how to accomplish that. Again, I appreciate the help