Hello, I work as a mobile maintenance tech, we service a couple different clients and have response time and coverage requirements with these clients. The company I work for does not want to hire enough techs to get the necessary coverage so they run skeleton crews which results in us being on call all the time and I either get no work and only make $10 for the entire day or I work 16 hours straight because I am the only tech covering this area. This makes my paycheck really inconsistent.
On top of this the ticket notification system is broken and has been for years. Whenever a glitch in the system causes a tech to be late to a call the tech gets written up for it not the IT team that maintains the notification system. The companies argument is you should be checking your board constantly when you are on call, which is an unreasonable expectation for $10/day.
Recently a coworker brought up that checking the board for tickets is work related activity and we should be clocked in when we do it, management was forced to agree that we could clock in whenever we check our board.
Checking the board takes like 30 sec so even checking every 15 minutes it won’t add up to much over the course of a 16-hour day. I’m looking for advice on strategies to min/max this to result in the company paying me as much as possible to put up with this crap. I’ve been checking the board off the clock every few hour for the past year or so. I want to either cause enough pain that they fix the notification system so I don’t have to check constantly or at least get paid more than $10 to check a board all day. Any advice is greatly appreciated.