The Question Of Overtime, And How You Can Make Sure You Are Get Reasonable Pay For It

It seems that bosses have widely contrasting attitudes to the topic of overtime. It is fairly rare to find a job in which it’s possible to work from 9 to 5 without being required to stay late from time to time. Some employers ask workers for a certain overtime commitment, but make a reasonable payment for it. A few require huge amounts of overtime from their employees, and refuse to pay any extra money for this. For people who work from home, the situation can be more flexible, but even in this case bosses may expect workers to put in time outside office hours. By contrast, in the various online jobs that have grown up in Internet business, people have much more flexibility to determine their own work timetable, and choose how many extra hours they wish to work.

One organisation I worked for, expected staff to stay late on numerous occasions, and yet stated officially that they refused to make any overtime payments. When I first joined, this employer had a reasonably liberal attitude to start and end times, and you were not expected to be on time every day. That was the explanation for not paying overtime; it was difficult to monitor hours worked. Then a new manager took over and they adopted an inflexible policy about starting times – employees were expected to be in the office and ready for work at half past eight in the morning. And yet at the end of the day the officlal attitude was quite different. Staff couldn’t go home once they had completed their contractual hours. Certain directors even used to stand around by the office door, making unfavourable remarks about employees who chose go home before they’d worked at least an hour’s unpaid overtime.

Their contention was that overtime pay was inappropriate because it might permit employees to spin out the time they took to complete the work they were asked to do. The reality was that we had to do overtime to complete the tasks required in time for deadlines. In effect the overtime we put in represented a cut, in pounds per hour worked, of the hourly rate for the job, and that was not marvellous to start with.

I worked there in the early nineties, and at the time Internet business was a relatively new idea. The the idea that you could work from home in online jobs where you might determine the amount of overtime you did, was not widely known.

Another argument that some have advanced for not paying overtime is that the company has to pay you for holidays and time taken off for sickness. The argument is basically disingenuous because the costs of holidays and sickness are calculated as part of a worker’s rate of pay to start with. When somebody self-employed is hired to perform the same task as an employee, they normally ask for a significantly higher hourly rate; on the other hand they are not paid for holidays or sickness.

Nobody can predict for sure the number of days a worker will be off sick, but one company I worked for told me that they allowed for seven days sick per employee each year. That is undoubtedly a lot higher than the number of days I have had off sick even over a few years. Obviously if an employee is constantly having sick days, this has to be dealt with through the company disciplinary process.