Hi! So at my place of work (in Ohio), a factory, we have all sorts of different departments. Recently, mandatory overtime has started up again after about 2 years. COVID hit and that’s the only reason why it stopped. The policy goes like this: each department has a list of all employees in the department, based on seniority. The people who have worked there longest are near the end of the list, the newest people at the top. Every day someone walks around and informs employees that they are next on the list and the next day they will have to work 12 hours. It used to be that they wouldn’t give you 24 hours notice, so this new change is actually good.
The issue though is the policy, to my knowledge, also says that you can’t have someone from a one department going to a department they are not from for their mandate. If they were mandated to stay over and all assembly lines in their department were covered, they could go home at regular time and it counts as their 12 hour mandated day. (Over time is 4 hours) since they’ve started it back up, everyone in my department who gets mandated waits to see if our department’s third shift needs us, then we are told to head to a different department to see if they need us. Often times, no one in my department goes home even if they aren’t needed in the department they are trained in. Instead we often get sent somewhere and “frozen” on on job for 4 hours, even though we’re told they can’t freeze us. And now we’re finding out that this is not the case in all departments. Some departments don’t get mandated at all, but these are the same departments we are made to fill with our manpower. We are each getting forced overtime every week rather than every 2 or even less because the rest of the factory seemingly is not getting mandated.
We do have the option to pass on mandates, but we have to use our PTO hours to cover it. With how often we get mandated some people can’t work them at all due to at home responsibilities and are already blowing through PTO.
I’m not sure if I’m here to vent about the chaos or if I’m asking for advice. This factory has gotten in trouble before for their poor forced overtime policies.