Should You Be Paid For Being On Call? 735
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?
An artifact of the 90s (Score:2, Informative)
Lots of companies used to give pay or comp time in exchange for on call duty, back in the days when the It staff was considered an asset rather than an expense. Those days are over.
Of course you should be paid (Score:5, Informative)
You're basically hooked to a pager, which means you need to be near a phone, and usually near a computer with internet connectivity.
I don't work in operations, but everyone in decent places I've worked at did get paid around 3hours of salary per 24hours of wearing the pager. Then it was a minimum of 1 hour per "call" (more like issue, as it could involve multiple calls) except for the first one of the day which was included in the 3hours.
That meant that in a typical week you'd get paid for (24*7)-40 hours of "pager duty", which amounted to 16 hours of salary, so 2 days extra. That's pretty good, assuming you're on a decent rotation and don't have to be THE guy doing it every single week.
Firefighting (Score:5, Informative)
Paid call (Score:3, Informative)
My wife is an OR (operating room) nurse who is paid to be on call, which I would consider to be roughly analogous to this topic. However, there are a couple of major differences:
1. She has to go to a specific location (the hospital) when called in. It's not like she can do her job from home.
2. She's paid hourly.
3. Usually if she gets called in, someone is dying. I would rarely, if ever, classify an IT emergency anywhere near as important as that.
Firefighter Analogy is flawed. (Score:4, Informative)
'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.
This is flawed, as in many fire departments or houses there are multiple crews. You've got 3 days 'in the house' then 3 days 'at home' followed by '4 days in the house' then 4 days 'at home.' When you're in the house, you're responsible for any and all calls that come in. So firefighters get paid for the time they are in the house. Just like most people are paid for the time they are in the office, but aren't paid for Saturdays and Sundays.
If he wants to correct the analogy, he should say that firefighters who are in the 'at home' phase, get called in, but don't get paid for it. They do get paid for it, just like Police Officers that work overtime or off-shift.
He's not really "on call" (Score:5, Informative)
As a independent contractor he gets to choose if he wants to work or not. If he wants to go out of town then go for it, but if they call and you're not available they're going to get someone else. You're not "on call", they just let you know "hey we have some work here if you want it, if not no problem".
Being an independant contracotr for a business just means you are someone they know with a particular skill and they will let you know when they need your expertise in the future. It's the job equivalent of "fuck buddy".
If he got paid for being "on call" as a independent contractor then we'd all have to pay plumbers, lawn mowing guy, electrician, mechanics, and all the other "use you when I need you" people in our lives for being "on call".
Being on call, is being at work. (Score:3, Informative)
If I'm at work I can't drink, can't go out of state, can't do anything outside of what my boss tells me I can do (basically).
If I'm no longer on the clock, I can do whatever I want (basically).
If I'm asked to be on call, I have to mold my "not on the clock" time to whatever my boss requires. I can't go out of state. I can't go to an amusement park with my kids. I can't go to a movie. Well, not unless I don't mind up and leaving to go home and sign on the laptop.
If your boss expects you to do x or y while you're not on the clock, you _are_ on the clock and deserve pay for it. The only time I allow my boss to dictate what I can and can't do is when he's paying me to allow him to boss me around.
Re:Not bloody likely! (Score:2, Informative)
Lawyers generally bill in 6 to 15 minute increments. They're not allowed to round up.
Wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
100 percent of wrong. Firefighters are not off-duty when they are on-call. They are on-duty. When they go off-duty, they are no longer on call. Firefighters are typically on-duty for a 24-hour shift for two or three days a week. On their off days, they are not on call. Thus, most of the time, a firefighter is NOT on call.
The workman is worth his hire (Score:2, Informative)
Rule is, you want work, you pay for it.
Way I see it, I'll take the pager and be on call, but the rule is, as I am a contractor, you pay standard-with-full-access rates, minimum 2-hour callout, every time that sucker goes off outside times I'm at the office. (You're paying already when I am at the office.) I bump my standard rates a bit to cover the possibility of interruption, if you want me to be available at any time. If I were an employee, any time that sucker goes off outside office hours, local labor laws say you have to pay me overtime, and a minimum of four hours if I get called into the office. I'd be willing to drop that to a minimum two hours of double time, from four of time and a half.
The fireman idea is flawed, because it is, in fact, not an on-call situation. You are paid for the time that you are on call, but you are actually in the fire hall while you are on call. Your shift ends, you close the door behind you, and nominally you are done. You don't have to worry about being waked up for an emergency call out, when you're off duty. It's much closer to the situation of a volunteer firefighter, who is on call 24/7 because there is nobody else and who is doing it basically out of altruism. Because of its volunteer nature, that doesn't apply either; you're not volunteering at your job.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
As a swede (who is a union member) I'd like to give my opinion on this.
Suppress wages
Not really, they generally only demand guaranteed minimum raises (which are normally just a little over inflation) and minimum pay dependent on the field people work in. So they don't really suppress wages, they just make sure employers don't try to stick their employees with miserably low pay, and that employers are forced to give out raises that at least match inflation.
defend the inept
Most of the legal action I've seen from unions has been against employers who have insisted on 15 year-old 15" CRT monitors being ergonomically equivalent to new TFT monitors, that employees should come in to work ten minutes early without pay and similar silliness that affects "all" employees ("all" with quotation marks because obviously management has brand-spanking-new 24" TFT monitors because the old CRTs would somehow hamper their ability to work efficiently even though they're perfectly fine for everyone else) or individual cases where an employer wrongfully fired someone and the union offered legal assistance.
petty crap during "bargaining" years
Ah, but the employers are even worse in this regard, nothing like moving assets out of one daughter company with a lot of employees into another daughter company just so you can say the business division is doing poorly and can't afford respectable raises for the employees.
strong arming members
Never heard of this, sometimes individual union representatives can have some wonky demands on employers though, although the only times I've heard of this have involved employers who were notorious for always trying to "bend" labor laws so there was a clear power struggle between the employer and the union to begin with.
and take money away for political purposes.
There are definitely a few unions that do this, they're mostly the classic big "social democrat" unions like LO who have a historic connection to various political parties though.
I'm glad that I'm a union member, it has saved my ass a few times when employers have tried various bullshit.
/Mikael
Re:Well, then... (Score:2, Informative)
If he's a criminal lawyer chances there is an extremely good chance he'll pick up by the second ring, and be on his way to the police station in 15 minutes; those guys have to hustle like that to make money.
If you're a big corporate firm lawyer, and an important client calls you at 2 A.M., you're damn well going to answer.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Informative)
For independent contractors or freelancers, a more comparable model might be the Freelancer's Union [freelancersunion.org] or an entertainment guild/mutual aid association like yours truly's union [editorsguild.com].
Both use collective bargaining to obtain health benefits and provide common resume writing/promotion/education/development services; the latter is a proper union has wage/working condition bargaining power by having a master agreement with all employers in a jurisdiction.
A union of freelancers is workable, and is the SOP in the film/television industry, when union benefits are made "portable" from job to job. In this case then the union's main job is to provide continuity of benefits, so I don't end up having six 401k's all over Los Angeles and paying COBRA one month out of every five.
Re:Firefighting (Score:5, Informative)
My brother is a firefighter, works 24 on, 72 off. He is at the station the entire time he is "on call", and never, ever gets called when off duty, unless someone needs to trade shifts. If he has training to do, it is either done during his shift (with obvious breaks for fires) or he gets paid additional to come in during his off time (or gets a 24 hour shift waived as payment, basically trading time)
Is the lawyer thinking of Volunteer firefighters? they usually work their real jobs during the day, and when the call comes, go to work as a firefighter. Many Volunteer departments in rural areas don't pay the firefighters, but do re-imburse them a token amount for mileage when they drive to the scene.
Re:Of course you should be paid (Score:3, Informative)
My company has a pretty simple setup. On Call Primary - $300/wk, On Call Secondary - $150/wk. Flat fee.
1. If you are forced to work more then 24 hours straight the secondary takes over for 12 hours.
2. If you have work more then an additional 40 hours per week, you get equal 'comp. time' (Ext Paid Vacation time)
3. If you were not on call and have to fill in for a last min change/emergency you get whatever time in 'comp. time'
4. During Scheduled Maintenance (min 1 week advanced warning) the primary and secondary are expected to be logged in and monitoring
5. You get comp time working more then 2 hours of maintenance per week while not on-call.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
Read history. Unions occurred when the oligarchs had all the power and the workers (often as young as 8) were little better than slaves working 7/16 with no benefits. Fast forward to the 90s. IT talent is scarce so they can't get away with this. Fast forward to about 20 seconds past the dot com crash. Threatened with wage arbitrage (i.e. outsourcing), IT personnel get hooked to pagers 24/7. Collar and leash optional.
Unions work in other countries like Sweden and Japan. Unfounded claims to the contrary, we're nobody special and they can work here too.
Is there abuse in unions? You bet. Is there abuse without unions? You bet.
Bottom line? If you don't push back, you get pushed to the wall, and asked to bend over.
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Informative)
My experience with lawyers has been that they expect a big fat retainer up front, and then they want to be paid more if they go beyond the scope of the initial retainer. Lawyers don't work on open ended commitments akin to keeping a website up and running in perpetuity. If we weren't talking about a lawyer here, I would say that I don't believe the gall of that woman. But since she is a lawyer, I expect her to be hypocritical and two-faced.
Lawyers nickel and dime clients to death. They charge for photocopies. They charge for drive time to and from court. They expense every single little thing that they can. For a lawyer to tell a webmaster that he is in the wrong for expecting some compensation for time spent after hours working on a website is ridiculous. Lawyers won't even talk to most people about legal matters unless they are getting paid to do it.
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Informative)
Cut and Dry here (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked On-Call shifts with a number of companies before.
Here's the deal:
The FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act] regulations provide that "[a]n employee who is required to remain on call on the employer's premises or so close thereto that he cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes" is considered to be "working." 29 C.F.R. [section] 785.17
It is against the law for a on-call person to be paid salary. They are non-exempt employees by definition. Any time spent fulfilling required job duties outside of the office must be compensated. Overtime pay scales may or may not apply by job description.
Since a home system, paid for at least in part by an employer, including compensated phone/internet bills and job requirements to maintain a home computer for work purposes (or a provided corporate computer for use at home, including rotated on-call hardware shared by several people) is an extension of the office and the duties of the job, that home system is essentially ruled by the courts to BE the office when on-call. Anytime an employer requires an on-call person to remain in their home, or in proximity to a computer system and to carry and answer a phone routed by the company at specific hours, then that person, under the FLSA, is in fact WORKING. The rate they're paid for that time spent "waiting" for a call may be billed at varying rates, but generally not less than 50% of regular pay, and any time actually on a call would be bileld at the standard rate for that employee (or overtime rate if it applies). Many companies pay a base "convenience" wage to people who are on call but take no calls during that time.
The Supreme Court, in previous rulings, has also concurred. If you are bound to a location, unable to leave and persue personal activities (say, go to a movie, go out to dinner across town, play video games online, go shopping at something other than a local grocery store, etc), or are mandated to be at a computer to handle calls within X minutes of a notice of an alert (the "you can do whatever you want, but you only have 30 minutes to answer a page" idea), then you are essentially work bound, and not free to use your time at your own lesiure. For example, if while on-call, you could go spend a weekend at your parents, so long as you answer calls per company policy, and meet SLAs for handling issues, they you are only required to be paid while actually working, but if that company required you to stay "within 15 minutes of a connected computer at all times while on-call" then you are work bound, and must be compensated at at least a base acceptible rate during that time, including time-and-a-half as mandated for hours over 40.
For example, at one of my employers, all i was required to do was return a paged call within 30 minutes. once the call was returned, it took about 5 minutes to determine what the issue was, but we had a 4 hour response SLA, so you could tell a customer, "I'm on call, and not at home, I'll call you back in 2 hours..." and that was acceptible. We were only paid for time actually logged on calls (rounded to the nearest hour). At another job, The 1 week a month you were on call, you were expected to keep a quiet household, be at home at all times aside from quick errands, and if you got a call, it had to be answered immediately, and you had to be logged in within 20 minutes of the call. We were paid 50% time for all hours "on call" except meals and sleeping and 100% time on calls (and time and a half as it applied only to time on calls).
Further, in many states (including this one), even if only billable when actually on a call, it is illegal to be paid for less than 3 hours in any 24 hour period, regardless of the number of hours worked. It's also illegal to be compensated for less than 1 hour for any block of time spent working that is more than 1 hour apart from another billable hour. For example: on Sunday, you get a call at 10AM that lasts 30 minutes. You get another call at 3PM that lasts only 15 minutes. They have to pay yo
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Informative)
There still are minimum wage laws, and in the case of Information Technology workers, you still have to be paid for over time explicitly by law unless you are making over a minimum threshold (of about $70k per year) as set by the US DOL. If you can document that you are not making minimum wage (a very real possibility as I did being a stupid college student back in the day working for some private companies) you can simply demand at least minimum wage and time-and-a-half for over 40 hours. That is the law in the good ol' USA at a minimum.
If you have a guy that is earning $100k per year and then complaining about being on-call 24/7/365, I have quite a bit less sympathy for them. If he is only making $25k per year and not getting paid overtime, then I'm quite a bit more sympathetic... and the law is sympathetic too!
If you were a former employee and now a "contractor", the labor laws are even less sympathetic to abusive labor practices, and may even be entitled to retroactive benefits, pensions, and pay if it can be proven that you are still an employee in spite of a legal fiction that the former employee is now a contractor. Of course that requires engaging in a lawsuit and pulling out all of the stops from a legal perspective, but if the choice is to relent and do something you are simply not comfortable doing or be fired, I think the choice of going after that former employer and current client through the judicial system seems a whole lot more attractive.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
No need for a union. Simply:
1) get written confirmation from your boss you are not elligible for overtime and on-call pay. Show him a copy of the FLSA related to on-call work and have them explain why they fee it does not apply to your position.
2) work as long as you feel you'de like to for that firm.
3) at some point later, present a copy of the FLSA 29 CFR 17 defining on-call pay requirements, having this notorized by a lawyer is nice too. Even an anonymous call to the labor board in your state may also work so you can remain anonymous and reap the benefits without job loss.
4) take large settlement check for all logged time (at time and a half at least, plus additional compensation as best as you can negotiate).
4a) if company offers your continued employment, great, if not, you have a real nice paycheck, plus back pay
4b) if check not offered, sue, you'll be due at least 3 times the back pay at time and a half, plus all your legal fees. It's a cut and dry case, you'll be compensated additionally for time lost, and likely will never appear in court.
Here's the conditions outlined in the FLSA regarding who should be paid for on-call waiting time (on call actual time on a call helping someone is assumed you'll be paid for, this is the "sitting around" time you should also be paid for...):
--Geography. How far can an on-call worker stray from the jobsite? The more restricted he or she is, the more likely it is that on-call time is compensable. Before cell phones and pagers, on-call people often had to be at home, by the phone. Now they can be anywhere, so the issue is less clear. That often brings it down to a matter of
--Response Time. How long a time do you allow for on-call people to respond? That frequently spells how far away they can be. If you demand the person be on-site in 10 minutes, says Jorgensen, the time is likely to be compensable. If it’s 60 minutes, he believes the opposite is true.
--Call Frequency. How often is the person actually called? In one court case, Jorgensen reports, an employee called three to five times a day was ruled to be working and had to be paid. In another case, one called six times in a year was not deemed so.
--Uniqueness. A fourth factor relates to how many of your workers can do the needed work. If there’s a pool of employees available, and employees can trade off the on-call responsibility, there’s less evidence that any one of them is restricted personally.
--Alcohol restrictions. If the company requires you to remain sober during on-call time, likely you qualify for pay during the entire time.
Other things that may factor in regionally or at the state level:
- additional compensation for interrupted meals, including at the least pay for the intire time of the meal plus the interruption, and potentially fair compensation for the cost of the meal.
- minimum 5 hours uninterupted rest clause. Get woken up at 3AM after going to sleep at 11PM. Have to be at work at 8AM next day, so you get up at 5:30. You did not get 5 hours uninterupted, so you must be paid the ENTIRE 8 HOURS OF SLEEP as if you were awake/
- no alternate compensation: can't be compensated with comp time, only payroll. In states where comp-time is approved comensation for on-call work, that must be at 150% the comp rate (equiv of overtime compensation pay). Further, an employer in most states can not make you leave early because you worked late the night before, nor cut your hours to below your average work week in order to avoid overtime.
- OSHA and other FLSA regulations on max time allowable at work in a 24 hour period (varies by job title as well, for instance emergency worker, driver, etc).
Re:Well, then... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
An independent contractor who has only 1 customer is by law considered an employee. If you're provided a desk, equipment of any kind, security access as an employee is (doesn't have to sign in, etc), is issued commands and job tasks by management, averages over 36 hours per week over a 3 month period or longer, has a dedicated manager, is expected to show up and work regular hours, etc, then the contractor is simply an employee who chooses to not accept HR to process their tax paperwork. In fact, in many states, it is ILLEGAL to have an "independent contractor" not be on the books if at any time their contract is open ended or not related to a specific task with a defined completion date. If he's there ofr a "contract job" where the job ends given a sety of conditions, and where he's the only one doing the work (not part of a team of other full time contractors), then he may very well be a contractor, but then he's got the power to negotiate or walk away as well, and should have a business contract with them, and not have filled out an employment application...
I had an employer try to pull this BS in CT. He thought it would be a great idea to fire us all, hire us back at a 10% pay raise, but save all the benefits, vacation, Social security and HR costs, etc. he saved about $300/week per each of us, and we got $50-100 more... Come tax time, we found out the hard way that just because an employer doesn't pay your matching SS costs and medicare, that does NOT mean it does not have to get paid... i had a $4K tax debt to deal with under this arrangement.
We spoke to a lawyer, and the state department of labor, and the guy got fined big time, and we each got the back pay X3, our tax debt reassigned to his firm, and 10% of what they took out of his ass for reporting him. During the process, he terminated us all instantly, so we also got compensation for unlawful termination and loss of work pay (plus unemployment on top). They also found out he'd been doing this for YEARS in cycles, and got him for a few hundred grand in unpaid taxes, and last I heard he was still serving a 9 year prison sentence for tax evasion (he tried to move all the money and the house to relative's accounts so they could not put leans on it when he refused to pay up). They took everything he had, business home and cars.
Contractors by definition can not be on salary. If you;re buddy is only paid 40 hours as a contractor, he needs to send them a bill and threaten to send a copy to the labor board and the attorney general of the state. Have him tell them he wants time and a half back pay, plus time and a half vacation compensation, plus $300 per payroll period in leiu of stiffer fines from the government, and give them a copy of the FLSA sections refering to the definitions of contractor and employee.
Re:Of course (Score:3, Informative)
Fire fighters have very specific regulations for what their hours can be like, and a separate section in American labor laws. They are one of the few occupations that are allowed to work more than 12 hours in a 24 hour period, but at the same time they are required to have 48 hours off after that 24 hour period except under explicit "emergency" conditions that are defined by law. Anybody comparing how firefighters are treated to an IT service tech is likely to find themselves seeing that it is the IT tech that is getting the raw end of the deal and that the analogy is not going to be accurate at all.
Soldiers also have very specific regulations on what they can and can't be expected to do, of course soldiers operate under the UCMJ and not standard civilian labor laws, so that is something a bit different. And if you are in the military you are guaranteed (usually) 30 days off each year as a benefit and a whole bunch of other benefits explicitly due to your military service. The pay isn't good, but it is all part of the package. Interestingly, the DOD has increasingly hired civilian contractors in part because the labor laws as they apply to enlisted personnel are complicated enough that they don't want a private to flip hamburgers or clean toilets (except perhaps as a part of a punishment). It is cheaper and easier to simply hire a civilian to do those kind of mundane jobs... and the civilians tend to stick around a bit longer than the typical rotation for enlisted folks. Soldiers and other military personnel also know full well that they will be called upon to make some significant sacrifices for their job... which is explicitly why people are willing to join up with the service in the first place.
Police and law enforcement officers? Yeah, they work ungodly shifts and are often expected to be on call..... but I don't know of any salaried police officers. Perhaps the "brass" at police departments might be salaried (if it is a large major metro department or if you are the "chief"), but it is common to see cities complain about how their police budget is gone due to a significant amount of overtime that has to be paid. While pay for being a police officer isn't the greatest, they do get paid fairly well and have other "fringe" benefits.
I just don't see comparing any of these experiences to being an IT guy who is salaried but gets dumped on by all comers and no respect, and no extra money for being essentially a peon to clean up somebody else's mess, and to do that all all hours of the day without any extra compensation. If you are a well paid geek and you signed up for the job knowing that would be the nature of the job, that is another story.... but it doesn't sound like that was the case in this situation. There are also specific labor laws regarding information technology workers for overtime that also must be followed... regardless of if the person is a contractor or normal employee.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you guys run your fire houses a LOT differently than ours, firefighters get paid while their on duty (including lounging around the fire house). Nobody starts a stop watch when they hit the threshold of the burning house and then stops it when they exit.
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Informative)
I call BS (or at the very least - you didn't know the whole story) - I have an IT friend (who is union) at D9 who collected evidence (in the form of proxy logs and security footage) in Southern Oregon where they fired a union janitor for just browsing regular porn on a teacher workstation. It was against the rules, they had evidence and they got rid of him - simple as that.
The union did nothing to stop management from taking that action. Now if they wanted to fire him for that reason, but had no evidence - I can see the union stepping in because yes - that would be a management abuse.
How many non union shops have you worked for where when layoffs came the managers, managers buddies, managers college friends (who they hired to collect direct deposit paychecks and nothing else) all kept their jobs, but the technicians and IT people all got cut? I've seen that too many times to count. Not saying this wouldn't happen in a union shop, but really - who's inept here?
My father and mother were both teachers in Oregon for all their working lives and have never dealt with any of the things you describe above.
Unions after all are what you make them - it sounds like you belonged to a group of criminals instead of a group of educators wanting to collectively bargain for better employment conditions.
What have you done for me lately? (Score:3, Informative)
That's great. I'm not saying that unions haven't done good things for the labor force in the US. They have. Muchas gracias.
HOWEVER, a great deal of the protections that organized labor used to provide are now provided BY LAW. This makes the labor unions somewhat superfluous.
Also, in many unions, cronyism is rampant. As has been mentioned elsewhere. You fall afoul of the crony brigade, with something as simple as someone not liking you, and you are FUCKED.
My grandfather was a nice, amiable guy. Good union man. Had a couple small black marks during a time he was struggling with alcohol. But the union stood by him. By the time the unions had major strikes, all his kids were out of the house and the house was paid off, so he didn't really lose anything when the union went on strike. So he voted to strike.
My father, also a nice, amiable guy. A good union man. No black marks on his record, ever. Had nothing BUT problems because during two strike votes, he voted not to strike. Why? He had three young kids and a wife who was currently out of work and monthly house payments. He couldn't AFFORD the strikes. Well, one of the guys (single and childless) who later became a union supervisor didn't take kindly to that. Every time this guy was put in charge of an area my father worked in, less than a month later my father was laid off, being told there was no work. Never mind that there is enough work in our metro area, PAID FOR AND PENDING, to keep literally every man in the local hall employed for several years.
The last time, he was replaced a week later buy the guy's nephew who was brand new to the union. And the union heads wouldn't do a damn thing about it. This essentially forced him into retirement five years early. Yet again, he and my mother just BARELY managed to squeak by financially.
Oh, did I mention both my father and my grandfather belong to the same union?
You think I'm going to pay "dues" to a group of self-appointed middlemen who sit back and do nothing positive for me while they smile at me and screw me over because one of them just "doesn't like" me? Regardless of my skill? Regardless of a spotless work record and work ethic?
FUCK THAT NOISE!
As an American, here's my union story... (Score:5, Informative)
And as an American in IT working at a unionized plant (I'm not in the union, but I write programs to do scheduling and such based on their ridiculously complicated seniority rules), let me give the other side of the story.
Yeah, this really happens several different ways. First and most obviously, they surpress the wages of the competent. There are people at our plant who are awesome workers who deserve more pay, and lazy people who should be fired and paid nothing at all. But firing is almost impossible, and the union insists everyone gets paid on the same scale. So the people who are as lazy as a pet coon make more than they are worth, and the competent people subsidize this by being paid less. Also, the minute workers unionize, management has to start playing heavy defense and trying as hard as they can to not give raises. Why? Because if they give raises and then have a bad year as a company (such as Chrysler and GM), the union won't take a pay cut, and they may go bankrupt. Every company who has watched the UAW over the years intuitively understands this, so they work hard at not giving an inch even in good times... thus depressing wages. My unionized plant is actually paid less than our non-unionized plants, so it really can happen that way.
Happens constantly. My father in law (a union member) quit his job as a union steward because he was sick of defending people who were in the wrong. At my plant it's the same way. Most grievances are filed by inept workers with a sense of entitlement. Likewise, most of the times management tries to fire inept workers, they can't, because the union defends them tooth and nail. We busted one guy repeatedly for spending hours looking at porn at work, and he kept getting defended. The only way we got him out was by essentially plea-bargaining him: you agree to resign, and we won't make public what you did, so your family won't find out. Otherwise, we couldn't have gotten rid of him, because the contract says you can only be fired if you commit the same offense twice in a six month period, and he was doing it outside the six month window (or at least that's how often we were catching him).
Happens all the time during bargaining, although to be fair both sides are petty. In my plant, both the union and the management hated a certain seniority rule, but neither wanted to negotiate or change it because "once it's gone we might not be able to get the rule back if we ever want it in the future." So you keep it (and fight over it) even though both sides agree it's stupid.
This has never been more true than under the current US administration. The unions are pushing for two new rules. The first is card check, which allows unions to organize based on a check of who is carrying cards, rather than having a formal vote in which both union and management make their case, and then the members vote. In fact, you don't even have to have a majority to unionize under this! And look at the "employee free choice act" rule change: it takes away the right to a secret ballot and makes people vote publicly for and against the union. That way everyone knows who didn't vote for the union, and coercion can take place. Both of these rules are strong arm tactics that do not benefit employees, and taking away a secret ballot or organizing without a vote or even a majority are all totally un-American.
Every union I know of takes dues from its members and spends them to fund the Democratic party. Big Labor is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, and everyone knows it. My father in law sees his dues spent to elect Democrats every year, even though he votes Republican. But that's how unions operate... just like some companies (cough GE cough) try to get in bed with government and carve out monopolies and policies in their favor, Big Labor does the same. They are all about increasing their size, financial and power bases.
Re:Well, then... (Score:2, Informative)
Speaking of health care (and to be more on-topic), my mother was a nurse (generally in a union), and she always received half pay for the hours she was on call, since she was an hourly worker. My father was a pilot (also in a union), and he received extra pay for the days he wanted to be on call if they were above his alloted time, or the days were counted against his allotted days (since he was salaried).
This was all several years ago, and I have never been an on call employee, but the lawyer's answer sounds a little fishy unless there's a service contract involved.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Informative)
"Sure, the constitution has its flaws, but it's better than what we have now"
This button made me smile, then frown, then cry.