Imagine going to work on a Friday and being given a task to complete by Tuesday, but this is a task that usually takes 10 days or more to complete. Would you be willing to work overtime on the weekend to get the task done even if you knew you wouldn’t get paid for it?

In this story, two employees are in this situation, and they decide not to work overtime. Their team leader has their back, but their manager is furious on Monday when she finds out.

Keep reading for the whole story and to see what you would’ve done in this situation.

AITA for not rendering overtime to do a task rushed by our manager?

So part of our work includes preparing the Bidding Request for certain projects which according to our corporate manual should at most take us 15 working days to do. And we usually finish it by 10 working days with diligent effort.

So we get a go signal to start preparing the bidding request for this project but the catch is, our manager wants it done in 3 whooping days because apparently the Big Boss is hounding her to get it done.

We got the go signal on a Friday afternoon, and manager wanted results by Tuesday.

They needed more people to get the job done.

Now usually it’s one person per project but since this was a different case, our team leader (not the manager) gave the task to two people i.e. me and another coworker.

The thing is, it’s still not enough to get it done by Tuesday since we have other work besides this particular task.

So team leader talked to the manager to tell her that this really cannot be done by Tuesday.

Manager told us to render overtime over the weekend.

OP explains how overtime works.

Now here’s the thing about our overtime compensation.

At the start of the month, we have to file an overtime request to the manager. If approved, we get paid for all our rendered overtime. If disapproved, we don’t get paid.

We file overtime request every month anyway, in case we suddenly need to render overtime.

This sounds illegal!

But our manager disapproved my entire section’s request this month because in her opinion, we don’t deserve it.

She said she sees the people in our section always going home at exactly 5pm while the two other sections under her are “diligently” still doing their work past 5pm.

This was also apparently to prevent employees cheating the company by staying at the office past 5 while not doing anything in order to get overtime pay.

But we don’t even do that.

They didn’t work overtime.

Anyway, our team leader didn’t force us to go to work over the weekend because she knows we won’t be paid for it. So we didn’t.

Come Monday morning, all hell broke loose.

We told the manager our reasons for not rendering overtime and she called us unworthy to work in any company because any employee in the country would’ve done everything they could given the situation.

OP isn’t sure if they made the right decision.

The people in the other section (the ones getting paid for overtime) agree with her and that we should’ve done more.

Me, my coworker, and our team leader stood by our choice not to work over the weekend.

So… are we the jerks here?

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Even if they were getting paid overtime, employees shouldn’t be expected to work all weekend on such short notice. I wouldn’t want to be told on Friday that I have to work on Saturday and Sunday. What if you have plans or just desperately need the “life” part of work life balance?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who got promoted, then realized they set her replacement up to fail.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say.

The deadline was completely unrealistic.

Here’s some advice.

Exactly!

Pay up or else!

It’s unreasonable to expect employees to work overtime without getting paid. It’s also unreasonable to expect employees to work overtime all weekend on short notice. It’s also unreasonable to expect employees to meet an impossible deadline.

Basically, the manager was being completely unreasonable! I’m glad they refused to work overtime.

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