Overtime pay

If you believe working for free as a potential investment, send me 100 bucks. In 10 years maybe I'll send you a check for $1,000.

 

Or you could grow a pair and not work 30 hours for free based on a wink-wink.

 

and if you all did that they would have no choice but to start paying overtime. But they know they have lackeys that will work for free, can't say I blame management.

 

When I was a manager, the No. 1 sin you could commit with me was not put down your overtime. I needed your overtime so I could make the case that I needed more people. And I wasn't going to sign a fraudulent time card and put myself at personal risk.

Bottom line: If you are not being paid for your overtime, your company is breaking the law. And you're allowing it to happen.

 

That would still be an investment, just a very risky one since I don't know you.

Lots of people work for free to improve their future prospects. Entrepreneurs, college students, volunteers. Athletes. Even lawyers. It's a normal part of life.

It doesn't mean there aren't limits or that time has no value. It means that sometimes there are reasons to put time and effort into something that isn't directly tied to immediate financial compensation. It seems that concept is controversial to some people. Your mileage may vary.

 

Entrpreneurs have their business at stake. College students aren't supposed to be working free internships any more unless it is one that involves actual learning and not a free source of labor. Volunteers do so because they want to help people. College athletes should not have been for the last 30 years, and are only now starting to get some limited compensation. Lawyers are usually professionals who typically earn more than the new threshold.

It's not a matter of occasionally staying the extra hour or two to finish something up, that is, as long as your boss is cool with letting you skip out an hour or two early when things are slow. What we're talking about is multiple hours a week, regularly, and the bosses are expecting it, or flat-out demanding you defraud yourself.

 

I was all in on working 60 hours a week.
Then I had a kid and wanted to be home.
Then my bosses cut overtime.
Then I refused to work more than 40.
Then my bosses wondered why we couldn't produce the amount of pages we did previously. The word lazy was thrown at me.
I didn't budge. It may have ended up costing me my job, but guess what - making 12.50 an hour wasn't making me happy and when you 20-somethings hit 30 or older and wonder what the hell happened to your life, you'll understand why working 20 extra hours a work for free when you could have been meeting the right woman or going on some stupid adventure with friends that provides lifelong memories wasn't the best move in the world.

 

I knew/assumed some (most? all?) of my beat writers were working more than 40 hours.

Mostly, it's because they were aggressive, competitive, wanted to own the beat and just did it.

I rarely had a formal schedule. If they wanted a day off, I gave it to them 99.9 percent of the time.

If I asked them to do something that I knew would take them over 40, I told them to put in OT.

Other times I tried to give them help, but they don't always like that.

One clerk we had to write up because he kept coming in early to get an early start on his shfit and I told him he can't work over 40 and not put in for it. I said if he felt it helped to come early, great. But he needed to leave early or come later some days when there was help or take a day off, and he still wouldn't.

Writers are especially hard to monitor, because they spend most or all of their time out of the office.

You gotta give credit to sports writers, editors, clerks, copy editors. You have to have a strong work ethic to do the job. Even if you stick to 40 hours.

 

I had a desk/design job once where I worked off-the-books overtime, probably 50 to 55 hours per week, for three years. The next three, I probably worked no more than 30 hours a week -- sometimes less -- and got paid for 40. It pretty much evened out, but I never worked unpaid overtime again.

 

I did work unpaid overtime for about a year right before our paper was sold. The old ownership was a family, and it was a tight-knit shop at the time. I looked at it like taking one for the team when things started to go south.
My issue with it, however, was that we kept kicking the can down the road.
If I worked 43 hours in a week, it was understood that I'd put 40 and start the next week at plus-3 hours. Well, that's fine and dandy except I'd end up at 45 for the next week. And 42 the week after that. And 47 the week after that. And so on, and so on. I knew the situation, but after doing it for a while it was just tiresome and obvious I was never going to recoup that time.
The week the sale went final, I think I was at plus-6 and finally managed to reclaim all of my lost hours. It took the better part of a year to bring the ledger back to even.
The new ownership came in and laid off half the building three weeks later. I vowed never to work unpaid overtime again. Nowadays, I keep a running tally in my head if I do something off the clock like a phone interview or a quick brief that takes 10-15 minutes at home -- something that's work, but not worth the aggravation of actually stopping everything to clock in. The next time I do clock in, I'll let the meter run for a bit before actually starting work, or let it run at the end of the shift.

 

I may or may not have shared this story but once in college, I witnessed an assitant manager at a retail store where I worked actually go into the software and chance the hours worked of employees because corporate wouldn't allow them to go over a certain amount (individuals and total for the store). We are talking 10-15 hours, divided over 5 or 6 employees. When I complained to the boss, I was fired.

I was a little vindicated when HE and the assistant were fired a month later for theft but I was still pissed they weren't punished for that specific incident.

 

That's illegal. You file a complaint with wages and hours of whatever federal labor department district you're in. If they retaliate, the feds crawl up their asses even more. If you swallow that kind of shit you deserve it.