Some companies encourage and even require employees to work overtime. Other companies completely prohibit or highly discourage working overtime.

In this story, an employee works at the second type of company. While overtime isn’t prohibited, it is frowned upon to the point where the bosses actually ask an employee to change the numbers on the time sheet so they can avoid paying overtime.

That sounds illegal. You’d think the boss would know better.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

You want me to lie about my hours so I don’t go into overtime? Okay.

I work in theatre, doing front of house/customer service work. So that means I typically do a lot of odd hours, with evenings and weekends.

At my former job, they only wanted to pay me hourly (despite asking for salary numerous times, and honestly, it would have benefited them more than me).

On average, my weekdays would run from 2:00 – 10:00, as I had my managerial/admin work I had to do during the day, which I couldn’t always do during shows and events.

It wasn’t always possible to avoid working overtime.

I tried to schedule things so I wouldn’t go into overtime, but every once in a while, it happened.

Shows run long, people like to stay and chat. Rental events don’t know their timings well and really mess up the time. It happens, just part of the job.

So it would be pretty common for me to finish with 8.5 or 9 hour days. And since I was paid hourly, that meant overtime.

This suggestion doesn’t sound legal.

Eventually, my boss and the Executive Director talked to me about why I so often went into overtime, and why did I come in early when I knew I’d be staying late.

I outlined that unless I couldn’t, I would schedule my days to try and have some leeway to avoid daily overtime, but it wasn’t always possible and they should understand that. Especially my boss, as she had my position at one point before I started.

While they did acknowledge that point, they didn’t want to constantly pay for a little bit of overtime.

Their solution was for me to adjust the hours on my time sheet on a day I worked over 8 hours, and just take what would have been overtime and put it on a different day. In other words, abuse labour laws so they wouldn’t have to pay me an extra 9 or so dollars for the half hour of daily overtime.

OP changed the numbers.

I was unimpressed, but I was already looking for a new job, so I decided to play ball. Because I knew I could still make my point with some Malicious Compliance.

Thankfully that first week, there were events I knew would likely run long. And they didn’t disappoint.

I ended up have to spread 6.5 hours of work over 2 days. One of which I came in after 5:00, but I ended up putting on my schedule that I came in at 2:00. Still the same hours worked, just spread out to avoid the daily OT.

The accountant noticed right away.

Well of course when time sheets were checked over, this was noticed that there were two days I charged for being in the office when I wasn’t by our accountant.

When she asked what the situation was, I explained that I did what was requested. I took the daily OT hours and moved them to days I wasn’t going into OT.

Thankfully the accountant and I were pretty close, so she just rolled her eyes at the stupidity of it all, and went to talk to my boss and the ED about it.

But changing the numbers didn’t really even matter.

The cherry on top of it all?

Because I still claimed the same amount of hours, I still went into weekly overtime, which ended up meant I got more money, because the weekly hours all came in one lump, rather than being spread out over the daily hours. (4 hours at 1.5 hours and 2.5 at double hours, rather than the 6.5 all at time and a half).

Oddly enough for the last couple months I worked at that mess of a theatre, they didn’t really harp on me about daily overtime anymore.

It makes me roll my eyes at the stupidity of the request to change the numbers to avoid daily overtime when OP was getting paid weekly overtime anyway!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who works fast and helps her coworkers, but is met with disapproval from her supervisor because of this practice

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Yes, definitely get it in writing!

This person thinks it would’ve been better to handle it another way.

Another person was confused about the time.

This is true.

Maybe OP only complied because she was friends with the accountant and knew she’d catch the error. Otherwise, I was expecting her to walk out the second she had worked 8 hours. That’s how most people seem to handle these types of situation.

The boss’s request was illegal.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who spent nearly 3 decades climbing the ladder at work only to be fired in a meeting that lasted less than a minute.