Company Changes Their Definition Of Overtime And Thinks It Will Save Them Money, But One Team Works The Same Hours As Before And Makes A Lot More Money

Jayne Elliott

35 minutes ago

blurred out woman happily holding a paycheck

Shutterstock/Reddit

If a standard work week is 40 hours, would you consider overtime to be working more than 40 hours in a week or more than 8 hours in a day?

In this story, one company changes their definition of overtime with the goal of spending less on overtime. That’s not exactly how it worked out!

Let’s read all the details.

Changing the definition of overtime? Great!

The company I used to work for changed their definition of overtime to be “Any hours worked over 40 per week” to avoid paying overtime to people who stayed later on any given day, and tried to encourage them to take that time in lieu.

I.e. if you worked 10 hours on Monday, you were encouraged to work 6 hours on Tuesday, instead of claiming 2 hours of overtime pay. (Here overtime pays at 1.5x your normal hourly rate, even if you’re salaried).

But OP’s team was an exception to the rule.

When they changed these rules they forgot about my team.

99% of the company worked regular 9-5 monday-friday shifts but my team worked a 24/7 rotating shift.

Just by the nature of working shifts like that sometimes you end up working up to 55 hours in a single calender week by doing normal 8 hour shifts with no overtime.

This was fine because it meant the next week you worked 25 hours or so. It always averaged out to be 80 hours a fortnight.

It added up to a lot of overtime pay.

But by the wording of this new rule (which was written into our contracts by the union so they couldn’t go back on it), we were suddenly entitled to loads of overtime.

It added up to about $6000 per year in extra pay from doing the exact same hours as before.

Wow! That worked out really well for that team!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

One person shares a lesson for management.