Imagine being at work towards the end of the work day when you get assigned a project you know you won’t have time to finish by the end of the day. Would you work overtime to finish the task or leave as soon as you’re scheduled to leave?

In this story, one employee was in this situation, and she used to stay to work overtime to finish the project. Then she found out her boss’s policy on paying overtime and decided she wasn’t going to stay late anymore.

This meant more work for her boss, but it’s not fair to expect employees to stay late and not get paid for it.

Keep reading for all the details.

Only management can grant overtime? Sure thing boss!

I worked as an assistant in a team of 3 for a broker’s office.

When I got hired I was told that since it was a “family business” everyone was expected to make sacrifices which SOMETIMES meant that overtime was needed.

As I came to learn, sometimes was just their way of saying every other day.

Working overtime and not getting paid for it sounds illegal.

Two months in I realized that most people in the company worked at least 5-10 hours of overtime a week…completely unpaid.

After a particularly hard 10 hour day (for the 4th day in a row), I went into my bosses’ office and asked how overtime requests worked.

She mentioned that the rule was “if we give you a task that needs overtime, we will let you know”. She then clarified that unless she ok’d that overtime was needed at the beginning of a client request/task, then we could assume we would not be paid any overtime.

For the next week I would receive extremely complicated client requests from our boss that would force me to stay in the office until 7-8pm (we start at 8:30am). When I asked our boss she would just say “I don’t know what to tell you, I did not ok the overtime”.

Two can play that game.

Ok then. So it’s gonna be like that.

For the next month, every time I got a client request I would analyse how long it would take.

Most of the time, if I got a request before 2pm I would be able to complete whatever they asked for before my scheduled time to leave (5pm). If I got a very complicated task then I would probably need to finish it in the morning.

Of course, my boss never stated that ANY client request/task required overtime.

Here’s how she handled projects that were assigned later in the day.

These would go like this:

Me: oh this looks fairly complicated boss looks at the clock reading 3:45PM

Boss: yup! Sure is! Thanks [my name].

Me: so nothing special about this? Ok. Then!

She never worked overtime again.

As soon as 5pm struck I was out the door. Oh client really needed this done today? Well I guess it could wait seeing as boss did not mention overtime!

Oh? Client in a different time zone was mad because nobody picked up the phone after 5pm? Well I sure am glad boss stayed until 9pm solving his request!

What’s that it’s 4:30pm and a client will lose hundreds of dollars if their request is not solved by tonight? Sure thing, I am not authorized to work overtime but I will put you through to my boss!

In the 5.5 months that I was there I never once heard my boss “grant” anyone overtime. I guess in her mind you can expect workers to work 60 hour weeks/come in on the weekend but…not compensate them because “I did not approve it”?

If her boss didn’t complain that she left at her scheduled time and didn’t stay for overtime, then it sounds like it all worked out well. Maybe the boss really didn’t expect her to stay for overtime.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a team that agreed to work overtime, but then not everyone showed up, leaving the rest holding the bag.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I agree. Don’t work unpaid overtime.

Think of “family” as a red flag.

This is a good way of putting it!

One person shares what they said to their boss in a similar situation.

Wage theft is real. Don’t let your employer get away with it. It sounds like the employee in this story wised up. She’d be smart to share her strategy with her coworkers. If they all refuse to work overtime, the boss will either have to start paying or hire more employees to take on the extra work.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who just let clients complain after her boss refused to approve overtime.