Employers seem to hold a wide variety of attitudes to the subject of overtime. There are not many jobs in which you just work a normal day without needing to stay late at least occasionally. Some companies ask for a certain amount of overtime, but make a reasonable payment for it. Others demand a lot of evening and weekend working from their workers, but don’t pay any extra money for this. For people who work from home, the position is potentially more flexible, yet even in this case employers will expect employees to work many hours of overtime. However, in the various online jobs that have grown up in Internet business, people have much more discretion to determine their own working time, and determine the extra hours (if any) they they put in.
One business I was employed by, expected employees to work huge amounts of extra time, and yet made clear that it was their policy not to pay any overtime. When I first joined, this employer had a very liberal attitude to observance of office hours, and people were not required to observe strict timekeeping. That was the compensation for the long hours expected. Then a new manager took over and they adopted an inflexible policy about timekeeping – employees were expected to turn up for work at 8:30 every morning. Unfortunately at the end of the day their attitude shifted. Staff weren’t allowed to leave at the time stated in their contracts. The directors even kept an eye on the exit, making unfavourable comments about staff who chose not to work late.
Their contention was that paying overtime was a bad policy due to the fact that it would allow employees to spin out the time it took them to get things done. The reality was that we had to do the extra hours just to finish projects by the stipulated deadlines. Thus the extra hours worked constituted a reduction, in pounds per hour worked, of the hourly pay for the job, which was not too brilliant in the first place.
All this happened in the early nineties, when Internet business was a relatively new idea. The idea that people could work from home in online jobs where you had the freedom to choose the amount of overtime you did, had not really taken off.
One other justification that some have put forward for not paying overtime is that the boss has to provide holiday and sick pay. This is not valid because these considerations are calculated as part of the employee’s pay level from the beginning. When self-employed workers are contracted to perform the same task as an employee, they usually charge a much higher rate per hour; but they do not qualify for holiday or sick pay.
It is difficult to predict the number of days an employee will be off sick, but one boss told me that the average employee was off sick for seven days a year. That is certainly significantly more than the days I have ever been sick in a year. Obviously if a worker is persistently taking time off, this needs to be dealt with through the company disciplinary process.
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