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Should You Be Paid For Being On Call?
theodp writes "Fortune's Dear Annie takes on the case of poor Dazed and Confused, an independent webmaster who's expected to be on call for his client at all hours of the day and night, but doesn't get paid for being on call, only for the 40 hours a week that he's in the office. Surprisingly, Annie throws cold water on the contractor's dreams of paid OT, citing these pearls of wisdom from an attorney who's apparently never had the 'privilege' of being a techie on call: 'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax. A webmaster, likewise, has slow times and busy times.'" What on call policies are you used to working with and how should it work in an ideal world?
In Denmark, the IT union is one of the stronger ones.
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You hear that? That loud sucking sound? It's the sound of an IT union driving the last of our jobs overseas at warp speed.
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I'm the only IT person here, and basically how it works for me (I designed the system as I was essentially creating the department) is that I work 40 hours per week, with the expectation that most of the time it will be the standard 9 - 5. If I get called during the night and I'm just on the phone and/or remoting in, that time counts towards the 40 with the time counted in 30 minute chunks (i.e. a 5 minute phone call counts as 30 minutes worked). If I actually have to come in, the time it takes for me to drive there + back to where I was is included in the worked time and (again) time is counted in 30 minute chunks. It works out pretty well for me.
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Re: Defending the inept The idea is not the legal action, but the grievances and myriad other difficulties in removing any union employee. Most union bosses don't want a single union guy let go, and it doesn't matter what his performance looks like. The classic example is the NY teacher's union. An expose a few years ago showed that there are teachers that are paid to sit in a room all day because they can't be allowed near children. Yet they remain on the payroll because of the extremely laborious process to fire anyone. Similar situations happen in other industries as well. The union had the good intent to prevent employers from firing union organizers or experienced people that are paid highly. Instead it turned into this - once you're in the union, we only care about you paying dues and staying in the union.
My experience, working with an education union in Oregon.
Suppress wages - I did IT, the school district was bound to make me an hourly worker by labor agreement with the Union, the Union that represented us was the union for school workers, janitors, secretaries, cafeteria workers. So yes, my wages were suppressed, I couldn't leave the union, couldn't get step pay raises because of education or certification, just by putting time in.
Defend the inept - Having the Union defend a coworker that threatened other coworkers (he talked about bringing a gun in if we didn't treat him better, to a school), tell me not to testify against another Union member who was accused of surfing child p0rn on an elementary school computer, oh it was grand.
Petty crap during "bargaining" years - Teachers union are "bargaining" so they all park in front of school district office, where a number of members of another union work, vandalize cars during work hours. I worked in administration for years and they never did anything like that.
Strong arming members - No secret ballots, blacklisting people who vote against what the union wants for a contract or strike vote, pressure to vote in State and Federal elections for the union's preferred candidate, etc. If you belong to a Teachers Union in the US, just try and vote against what the union wants, and they know who you are because you had to show your union card when you turn in your ballot.
The trouble ensued when he was about to be laid off and his employer decided (instead of letting him go) to offer him a position as an independent contractor, paid at a rate of 40 hours a week in the office.
If that's really what happened, he's got more problems than this on-call business. As described, that is what the IRS calls 'conversion' and they will reclassify him back as an employee, fine the crap out the employer and keep the self-employment taxes he's been paying as a contractor (double-dip).
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Being forced to remain in contact, remain sober and live your life with the lingering wonder of being called or inturrepted at any moment is a job in itself. If you are on-call, you should be getting paid for it. I work in tech support for a healthcare system. I am paid hourly, and in a rotation where I am on-call for one week every five weeks. During this time, I am guaranteed $2.50 per hour I am off duty and carrying a pager. If I come in, I get three hours of overtime whether I am here for three hours or five minutes.
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My policy always was, my pager compensation was proportional to the potential impairment of my own agenda.
What I mean is, if you expect me to reply to you within a certain time frame, then I have to be near a phone or within cell coverage. This restricts where I can go. If you expect me to connect in remotely, I have to be near internet connectivity, and most of the time be carrying my laptop with me. This further restricts where I can go, and what I can do when I go there. If you want me to be on site within a certain time frame, that even further restricts where I can go.
If I can watch TV, go to the movies, or out for dinner and still be on call, that's not going to cost you as much as if I have to be within 30 minutes of being on-site from the moment you call me.
Historically, I have been lucky. One employer paid us $500/week to carry the pager with a 90-minute call-back SLA (and then hilariously lost the pager number and refused to admit it, so was unable to call us for 8 months). One customer was quoted something stupid like $5K/week for 7x24, 60-minute on-site (plus hourly when we got there). Any call time was billed back to the client, and we (theoretically) got time-for-time in exchange for that. My current employer has a pager our customers to call, but since it is 7x24 it is optional to be in the rotation and for various reasons I've opted out. In addition to receiving money for your week on the pager here, time is tracked very strictly and we get time-for-time for any pager-call time served.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I have a lot of experience dealing with various nursing unions (the mothership hospital and the small branch I worked at operated an off-site renal unit which had staff from both hospitals working together), and from what I've seen, the issue isn't that specific teacher's union. It's the majority of them.
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Well, I hate to disabuse any fantasies out there but I'm the CTO of a *small* software company ;). I get paid well, but not in any way comparable to a board level position at a large (or even mid sized) company. I get to spend time in the board room. I get to be the software architect. I get to be the principal engineer. Apparently this job is about lots of 'opportunity' - LOL.
I wasn't always the CTO of a company, and I have been in the 'on call' support position when a very large company bought a smaller company I was the architect for. These responsibilities were added w/o any recompense. It was only for a transitional 1 year period though. I have been on call support at other times as well (especially early on in my career) and it was something I expected in moderate doses.
The issue the contractor in the article appears to have is that he/she negotiated a contract that stipulated they were paid for in office work but that they would not be paid for out of office work.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't put up with someone yelling at me at work, or a CEO doing it to me in public (my current CEO and I have heated discussions (we don't shout though) but we always manage to differentiate our work relationship from our personal relationship.) I doubt I'd put up with a CEO screaming at me in private either unless I felt I deserved it for some reason (i.e. login: root password: *** cd / rm -rf)
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I would LOVE to be an hourly paid worker, if they divided my current annual salary by 2080 (that's 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year) and determined that to be my hourly wage. I reckon my gross income would about double, as hourly paid workers get overtime as a matter of law.
When I worked in Britain, I WAS hourly paid. We were on flex time and allowed to work no earlier than 8AM and no later than 7PM. Security checked the building at that time, and unless you had a note from your manager allowing you to work late you had to leave.
Also we had a 35 hour work week, and as hourly paid, we did receive overtime for any time worked beyond 35 hours, provided it was agreed in advance. However, we did have to clock in and out, and working at home was forbidden and not paid. If you were called at home it was an automatic 15 minutes of overtime, minimum.
Incidentally, all this was negotiated by our union. I was very pleased and happy with the union and gladly paid my dues.