I work in a physical production facility so employees have to be on site. We operate on the basis of large contracts, and several months ago we were scrambling for new contracts because one of the existing ones didn’t send what they promised us and cut our hours to prevent layoffs. In May we gladly worked a lot of overtime one weekend a few months ago to secure a new contract, and when we secured it management was promising monthly work and looking at 4-10’s split front and back half of the week and two shifts to cover work that would be coming in over the weekend, and a few more hires to cover the gaps. They even had us fill out forms with what schedules we would prefer that included one weekend day.
Now the work is coming in seriously, right before the weekends, with the client wanting large quantities of it out on Monday. What is management’s solution? Our regular 4 -9’s with 4 on Friday then “requesting” volunteers for weekend overtime with the pressure that if they don’t get enough volunteers to cover keeping 2 stations running 2 shifts over the whole weekend, they would assign overtime shifts.
The real kicker is that half our staff was twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do the late half of last week but they weren’t allowed to leave. No. We all had to stay at work with nothing to do while we were being pressured to sacrifice our weekend because that’s when the work would come in. One of our guys didn’t even get a day off because he was pressured into working both days, and has volunteered to not have a single day off the rest of the month. Stuff also got fumbled and we didn’t have the right stock to do the work so we were mostly twiddling our thumbs yesterday too and ended up leaving early and loosing a couple hours of our overtime. They also have one of the most experienced workers who can do these tasks on leave for the rest of the month.
Granted, I’m making the best money of my life, and this is the only high paying workplace in this city in the only industry I have enough experience in to support myself, so I’m pretty stuck. But I’ve been forced into this kind of overtime over extended periods of time before, and it leads me to physical and mental health issues that I cannot afford to risk right now when I have a mortgage and no support system. I also have no one to help me get stuff like cleaning or grocery shopping done if I had to work straight through, because I get off after everything is closed in a city too small for a 24 hour Walmart if they even still exist.
It turns out that in the US, and there is absolutely no worker’s rights protections from being forced to work overtime, no cap on how many hours someone can be required to work, and outside of the rare person with an employment contract that specifies their hours, only the vague OSHA guidance for fatigue that becomes dangerous, but it’s based entirely on what an OSHA inspector decides is a dangerous level of fatigue. This country NEEDS protections for workers for how much an employer can REQUIRE employees to work, above which threshold workers cannot be fired for refusing to work more hours; over which cap the worker can agree to work if they really want to, but they cannot be forced to.
I ended up volunteering for Saturday shifts to make sure I can go to what I want to on Sunday evenings, a new hobby group I want to join, but there’s a prevailing sense of expectation for us to work through the next three weekends, and I fear getting assigned to Sundays too.