Coming 30 minutes early to work is one thing, but 3 hours is quite a bit of overtime. Then you have people working two shifts in one day to cover for someone else's absence and then you have those scheduled to work 7 days a week, 10 hours a day most of those days.
I don't know if they get overtime pay, but I'm dead sure it's illegal overtime. Why are they doing this? Is management secretly pressuring them into doing it or am I missing something?
For the record, all they get (publicly) is a pat on the back. Hell, last (and only) time I worked almost 4 hours overtime out of my own free will I didn't get even this, so I swore not to work overtime anymore.
Plus, whenever we hit great daily numbers, management is like “push harder, let's break records”. Not to mention they make deals that bring us more traffic and we're already short-staffed.
To me that's brewing a toxic environment of overworking and inevitable burnout. I just don't understand why some of my coworkers are participating in this. If I ask, they'd probably just say they're passionate about the job and see nothing wrong.