Imagine working at a job where you usually work overtime in order to finish up orders before leaving for the night. If the company owner banned overtime, would you finish up the orders anyway, or would you comply and leave the orders for the day shift?

In this story, a group of employees is in this situation, and they have no choice but to comply. Keep reading to find out why this was a big problem.

No overtime? Well it’s not our money.

A while a go I was working in a factory on the night shift.

The night shift was mostly young guys, while the day shift was mostly older employees who had worked there a while.

The day shift was payed about twice as much as the night shift on average. (This will be important later, I promise)

They often worked overtime.

Each order took around 2 hours to set up and would have to be reset if the machines were turned off.

The machines had to be shut down at the end of the night for safety reasons. Due to this, our shift often would leave a little late to finish an order before we left.

We would usually end up with an hour or two of overtime a week. Our department director was fine with this, and actually appreciated our work ethic.

The owner made a new rule.

The owner was trying to cut costs and saw our constant overtime as an issue. He ignored the advice of the department head and said there would be no overtime, period.

We, naturally, complied and would shut down the machines in the middle of orders, so we could leave on time.

The result was that the day shift would often spend 2 hours on set up for less than 20 minutes of production (at a higher pay rate then our overtime pay).

One month later we were allowed our overtime again.

The owner obviously didn’t understand the consequences of banning overtime until he saw what happened for himself. My question is, why did the day shift get paid more than the night shift?

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person asks a question I’d like to know the answer to as well!

Another person has a theory about why the boss pays the night shift less.

Everyone seems to be pointing out the same problem.

One person shares a story about their place of employment.

Bosses don’t always make the right decisions.

If you liked that story, check out this one about a delivery driver who gave two weeks notice… so his employer disabled his truck when he was 300 miles from home!