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Antiwork

What to do about boss demanding shift work response times for on call work?

Hello, I work as a mobile repair man for some specialized equipment, the company has two types of work. The first is shift work where you clock in at a certain time and clock out at a certain time and you get paid for that period whether you work the whole time or not. During shift work you are expected to leave your house to go to jobs within 5 minutes of receiving the call (you are getting paid to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice). The other type is on call work where you only get paid hourly when there are jobs and when there isn’t you go home unpaid. You are supposed to have 3 hours to get to a call when on call to account for you being out running errands or something and having to go home and change first, my boss has come…


Hello, I work as a mobile repair man for some specialized equipment, the company has two types of work. The first is shift work where you clock in at a certain time and clock out at a certain time and you get paid for that period whether you work the whole time or not. During shift work you are expected to leave your house to go to jobs within 5 minutes of receiving the call (you are getting paid to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice). The other type is on call work where you only get paid hourly when there are jobs and when there isn’t you go home unpaid. You are supposed to have 3 hours to get to a call when on call to account for you being out running errands or something and having to go home and change first, my boss has come with his own faster standard of 1.75 hours response time for on call work which is not enough time unless you are sitting at home waiting for the call and not doing anything that would cause a delay (our area is quite large and jobs are often well over an hour away). The hourly pay is pretty good so you make decent money on shift work but the on call rate is only $15/day if you don’t get any calls. This boss has decided to understaff our area and just use on call work to get coverage because you need at least two people to cover one day worth of shifts but one person can cover the entire day if on call (this occasionally leads to us working 16-hour days). This bosses arbitrarily more strict standard goes against company policy but he will never state it in writing, he will only yell at you over the phone for exceeding his response time by 5 minutes. Also per company policy, on call work is only supposed to be used as a short-term emergency measure to cover staff shortages like people getting sick or quitting, but my boss just uses it for 90% of coverage. What would you do in my situation? Any advice for telling him to stop bothering me about his made up numbers without getting fired? I really enjoy this job and fixing things and my coworkers are great, it’s just this one aspect that is getting annoying. Thanks.

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