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?
salary sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Interesting)
In Denmark, the IT union is one of the stronger ones.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personally I believe it depends upon if you're. (Score:3, Interesting)
It holds true even if you're simply given the added responsibility without a change of position. Don't like your position at your company? Renegotiate or leave. You're not entitled to some sort of 'automatic pay' increase just for being on call.
I'm the CTO of a small software company. My board can, and often does, call me at all hours of the day and night. I find myself spending quite a few Sundays or Saturday nights flying out early to meet with the board prior to important 3rd party meetings, I don't get paid extra for this, but I certainly considered this possibility before accepting the position and I made sure that my compensation package reflected these 'hardships.'
In addition, as you've pointed out above, specific types of positions tend to come with 'on call' responsibilities, it is unusual for someone to suddenly get saddled with the expecatation that they should be 'on call' outside normal business hours (although it does happen, and has happened to me.)
It, as usual, comes down to the simple fact that when you negotiate a salary you need to base your acceptance upon the possibilities not just what's down on the job description because those job descriptions are rarely written by people who know what they're talking about (sadly.)
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Of course you should be paid (Score:5, Interesting)
I got paid (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine had 100% extra on his boss webservers, but that was because he had built it from scratch and was probably the only one who could fix any problems in the time his boss wanted it to be fixed.
In my opinion, this Annie should be paid atleast 50% her normal salary when she is on call. This is something which should be in the contract with her employer. If the website is so important so she can't fix it in the morning, then it means it's also important enough to pay for on call service.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well, then... (Score:2, Interesting)
This guy is expect to be on call 24/7/365... No thanks.
I have worked a couple jobs that I was on call 24/7/365. I did not get paid for being on call. It was automatically a minimum of 2 hrs that i did not have to work during normal hrs. The best calls were the ones that I got after I had been drinking for a few hours. It is amazing how long things take to get fixed when you are drunk. If I had to go into the office, the clock ran from the time that I got the call to the time that I got back home. It always made for short weeks. Almost every Friday we would go to lunch at a pub and not go back to work.
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Stew-pid (Score:1, Interesting)
"Mr Lawyer" is a dumb a$$ -- I'll just bet you can't call him 24x7 and expect "no additional charges". Get a grip dude.
Absolutely (Score:4, Interesting)
Impairment Compensation (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Paid call (Score:1, Interesting)
Like your wife, I too, work in a hospital but in IT. We in IT, take turns being on call. However, we are paid for being on call. It's a nominal sum but we are also guaranteed one hour of pay if we have to come in even if it's for only 5 minutes of work. Of course, a lot of the time, we can handle the call from home. /. during work hours in that case.)
Frankly, I don't know how I'd react if they decided to not pay us. Given someone at my age (56) would have a difficult time in getting another IT position, I guess I'd pretty much have to accept it. (Course I wouldn't feel too bad about spending sometime on
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA.
He's classified as a contractor, but the odds are he'd legally be considered an employee were the company audited for payroll taxes. Could even run into labor law co-employment issues. Basically the company is doing exactly what those laws aim to prevent - getting full-time services from an employee without paying for that employee's benefits.
More to the point, this company is his only customer; he reports in the office 40 hours a week, just like an employee, and he gets paid for those 40 hours, just as though he were salaried. He probably isn't in a position where he wants to just shrug them off as "a non-paying customer"; that's not the nature of their relationship in anything but name.
The company decided they could have their cake and eat it too, and so far nobody's called them on it. It's a pretty sweet deal for them if they don't get caught.
He says he has an oral agreement (which would be a valid contract, but hard to prove) that says he should be paid hourly. He might be able to start reporting the time he actually works off-hours and try to treat it as breach of contract if they won't pay for those hours. However, an adversarial approach does carry risks, especially when your current business relationship is really outside the legal bounds of how things are supposed to be done.
Getting compensation for hours of merely being reachable would be much harder without a contract that specifically provides for such pay.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
The last time I worked on call, I got an hour of overtime per weekday, and two hours on the weekend just for being on-call....and I was paid over time if I got paged and had to go in and do some work...but that is working in a Country that has real labour laws, Canada. Before that, I worked in Charlotte, NC, and if I didn't do on-call for free, I would have been let go from my job. A friend of mine working for another company there sometimes put in as much as 60 hours of over time, answering on-call problems, and never got paid dime one for it. Don't work in North Carolina if you can avoid it!
ttyl
Farrell
Re:Well, then... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, it sounds to me like your problem wasn't unions in general but rather the teachers' union in the US.
While that might have been part of his experience, this matches a lot of what I've heard and not just from teacher's unions.
In short, the people who feel they have the most to lose get involved in union leadership. Also, if all of the union leadership are, say, Java programmers, then I bet they might negotiate harder for the benefits of Java programmers over networking engineers (which is pretty close to the "suppress wages" part of the teacher's union example).
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. He actually doesn't "have" to provide it.
He's an independent contractor. He doesn't have an employer, he has a customer. He doesn't have to do anything he's not paid for. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't feel like doing. On the other hand, his customer doesn't have to pay him for anything not in the contract, and they don't have to keep him as a vendor.
I get the pretty distinct impression that he agreed to a an hourly paycheck based on doing the exact same job he did before, which job had formerly included on-call duties. Not being privy to the actual conversation, it's hard to say for sure, but it sure sounds like the subject of compensation for non-working on-call time didn't come up at all.
If it's an expectation of his customer's that he provide that service as part of the contract, and he decides that he doesn't want to, then he'll find himself with one fewer customer the first time he decides not to answer the phone. And since his former employer is his ONLY customer...
Again, our newly fledged independent contractor has to decide whether the current terms are worthwhile. If not, then it's time to go back to the negotiation table. The result of renegotiation can be one of three possible outcomes:
1. Contractor gets pay increase or some other alternate compensation.
2. Contractor does not get pay increase but keeps contract.
3. Customer finds another contractor more willing to play ball. Contractor is looking for another job.
Being an independent contractor means you have to negotiate for terms of employment, pay your employment and income taxes, etc all on your own. A lot of full-time employees think of independents as making craploads of money and living the life of Riley, but in reality it's a profitable-but-risky proposition with absolutely zero job security, and there's a LOT of paperwork. If it works out and you can maintain a solid workload, it's extremely profitable, but work could dry up any time. That's part of what makes it profitable - you take the risk, you get paid more.
Most contractors I know (myself included back when I did it) work through a firm that takes care of the paperwork and taxes, assists you in finding the next gig, etc, and takes a reasonable cut of the take for their services. It doesn't guarantee work, but it means all the legal stuff is taken care of efficiently and correctly and you have more billable hours available to easily make up what you pay them.
Re:Personally I believe it depends upon if you're. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm the CTO of a small software company. My board can, and often does, call me at all hours of the day and night. I find myself spending quite a few Sundays or Saturday nights flying out early to meet with the board prior to important 3rd party meetings, I don't get paid extra for this, but I certainly considered this possibility before accepting the position and I made sure that my compensation package reflected these 'hardships.'
Is your income/lifestyle comparable to the average IT guy? Just curious. Back in my 'office drone' days one I got into a shouty match with one of my coworkers. One of the higher-ups had a private chat with me and I explained that the other person started yelling and that I wasn't going to tolerate that crap. So the higher-up told me this story about how he worked at a big company you've heard of and how their semi-famous CEO would stand an inch or two from your face and yell at you at full volume. This guy was blissfully unaware that the tolerance for that sort of abuse was proportional to the amount you paid for your car.
I don't mean to cause any offense, but the more you stand to gain from the success of a company, the less of a hardship coming in on a Sunday is. Maybe I've just got the wrong image in my head, but any 'Chief' in a company is unlikely to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Re:Personally I believe it depends upon if you're. (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re:Well, then... (Score:1, Interesting)
You're in SWEDEN. Not the US. Attempting to compare the two systems, which have the same name but under the hood work off of entirely different precepts, is foolhardy.
No, that's actually A Really Good Thing (TM)! We gotta learn from eachother. You know, life's too short to not learn from other's.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
And Mr. Lawyer bills accordingly.
I don't quite see the problem here. Most employers that make employees "independent contractors" also make them turn in an invoice to get paid on, so they have a quasi-legitimate paper trail for the feds.
Bill everything. Just like Mr. Lawyer does, if you get an after hours call, it gets billed at after-hours rates.
Work is billed in minimum blocks. Some people do 15 minutes. Some do 1 hour. Someone else mentioned 3 hours for off-hours work. I bill blocks of 1 hour, unless I'm being nice. :) If I'm doing a big project on a customer site, I don't round the hours much (08:59 or 09:01 will always be 09:00). If they call me on the off hours and expect any more than a simple answer and a "we'll talk about it at the office on Monday", that time is getting billed. Sure as hell if they keep you on the phone for 15 minutes, that's billed as "15 minutes - phone support". If they squeeze an hour worth of work out of you on a Saturday, that'll be billed as "1 hour work at off-hours rate"
Billable hours includes travel time. If it takes you 30 minutes to get to the customer site, and 30 minutes to get home, that all gets billed. Gas and wear and tear on your vehicle isn't free.
They may not like it, but if they threaten to fire you over it, you'd have built a civil court case.
Of course, consult a **LOCAL** lawyer, and not Slashdot before flexing your muscles. Your lawyer may suggest to get a statement signed by your manager simply outlining the terms of the contract. Now what they said is in writing. Feel free to slide a one liner in about after-hours rates, it probably won't be noticed. :)
Some places like having "contractors" because they can be terminated at any time, depending on the contract (which appears verbal in this case). Unfortunately, you can't really just say "Well, screw you, I'll go somewhere else", because there aren't that many "somewhere elses" to go right now.
And always remember, paper trails go a lot farther than verbal statements. "Well, he said....." nah. "In this document, it shows that we agreed to...." ya.
Here is an actual, reasonable policy (Score:3, Interesting)
This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.
For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.
If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.
So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.
My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.
Re:Well, then... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well, then... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I wanted to make sure somebody said what you said. This actually happened to me, in a less nefarious way: I was given a job structured as an IC instead of a regular employee; but sometime later somehow the powers that be smelled the situation and decided it stunk. The whole issue hinged on "do you offer your services to the public", which I didn't, and that got the employer in trouble. They changed me into a real employee lickity split.
What a cry baby... (Score:3, Interesting)
If he can't change his rates because someone else is willing to do it, then tough. That's what the world of contracting is all about. Sorry your company laid you off and then re-hired you this way. Get off your ass and get another job, and deal with it until you can. If you can't get another job, maybe you just aren't that good. Deal with that also, it means you have to take the shit jobs to earn a living.
And why is a webmaster being called at all hours of the day and night?? Is it because the site keeps going down?? Then it's your own fucking fault
Get some cajones and learn to stand up and take responsibility for your own life. You let people take advantage of you, this happens.
My on-call stories (Score:3, Interesting)
My first on call job I had programming call centers for a major company. My basic job was manning the hotline during the weekday from 6am-3pm, doing tickets, and whatnot. The rest was being on call which was shared for a week between 5 people. Every week, there was one primary, and one alternate. The primary from the following week was the alternate for the next week, and so on. It came out that you were only on call 2 out of 5 weeks, and that was fine.
Until the politics came into play.
After about a year, one person "graduated" to a new position where he wouldn't have to be on call. Another person left the company, and was never really replaced. So now I was on call 2/3 weeks. In theory. The other two people were very lazy. One of them was some Orthodox religious person who seemed to have major holidays and festivals about twice a month where she could not be on call and she'd "trade weeks" with one of us, but never really did more than say she'd take "next week, for sure." The other was a kind of a nightclub-hopping single "ladies man" who dressed sharp and partied hard. Even when he was on call, he couldn't hear the pager or would take hours to reply.
My boss just rolled over, because she was afraid they'd pull some EOE stint, and she was sort of passing the time until she left on maternity leave. So I was unofficially "on call" 24x7 for about half a year. I got paged about 2-3 times a night, on average, with jobs that went from a 5-10 minute fix to some that lasted many hours. I got no extra pay, and when review time came around, I got a 3% raise. I was making about a third of the wages of someone else in my position, so she pulled the "well, you're not perfect enough for industry standard" card. My response was to quit.
For up to a year afterward, I still got a few calls a month from the former clients, vendors, and business partners. Most knew I didn't work there anymore, but, "Pleeeeeaaaaase, can you fix this? No one is answering the pages!" No.
In other jobs, I was compensated with unofficial "comp time," and sometimes a cash bonus as a kind of "thanks for covering our ass." Comp time works like, "You worked all night fixing that?" Pfft, don't come in tomorrow, or "I am adding an extra vacation day you can use in any way you see fit later."
Pay people to be available or risk them leaving. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked this way for years. (Score:3, Interesting)
I do this kind of work for a living, as a consultant who provides support for the work I've done.
In one case, a client of mine relies pretty heavily on my work and has for many years. She knows that if she calls with an urgent problem, I'll do everything I reasonably can to get back to her as quickly as possible -- day or night. In return, she knows not to raise the panic flag on little stuff during off hours. That's good enough in most cases.
We've talked about going to an SLA with, for example, a 4 hour response time on critical issues. My answer to that, is that when we move from "best reasonable effort" to a contracted response time -- even though I am nearly always inside that window already -- the cost goes from being covered by our regular work to several thousand dollars a month. Once it's a contracted promise like that, I have to keep backup people trained on the systems in case I'm on a long flight or get sick (or whatever) and I have to wear a pager, and get no time off without paying someone to cover for me.
There are ABSOLUTELY times when it makes sense to pay for that kind of coverage. I could even argue that this system is important enough that she should do it, but I also have to be clear that for 99% of the time -- and has always been the case for the last ehemteen years -- it will be money that doesn't buy any new results.