Are You Forced To Work Overtime? If you are, then you know how draining it is. You’ve felt that exhausted feeling after a 16-hour shift. Or you’ve realized that you just worked right through your weekend only to have the work week starting up early tomorrow morning. Well, I’m sure you’ve figured out that instead of this being the wonderful opportunity to make a little extra cash, it’s actually a devious and sinister device used by the corporation to both save money and maintain corporate power over labor.

My first experience with overtime involved a sporadic/seasonal work schedule combined with pressure from union leaders to make more money. I started at 8pm and was instructed when I got there, by the company and union officials, that they did not know what time we would be quitting but that we would at least be working for one four hour shift. Eight hours came around, 4am, and almost everyone, including union officials, continued to work straight through. A few of us realized that we had put in our eight hours and walked off the job. But the pressure to go back to work was tremendous. We were threatened with not being called for another job if we didn’t work overtime.

My second experience, and luckily I’ve only had two, was in my current job. This time, I see the forced overtime from a management point-of-view because part of my job is to work closely with the managers. So far, I’ve heard the scheduling manager say:

To foremen: “If you don’t get people to volunteer for overtime, I’m going to force people to work overtime.”

To workers in regards to working overtime: “Aw come on, what else are you going to do, watch TV? Don’t you want to make money?”

To other managers about overtime: “I want to keep track of the guys who don’t work overtime so we know who’s working and who’s not.” This information was then used to guilt those who were working less overtime into working more overtime like, “so-and-so worked this much overtime and you haven’t worked any, how does that make you feel?”

To me, both situations are disgusting for two reasons. One, managers think that they have a right to force someone to work overtime. Two, the majority of workers complied without a fight. The first reason is true, I believe, there are no laws preventing forced overtime in many states in the U.S. Please send me information to the contrary if this is incorrect. And as for the compliance of workers, that’s understandable because in the U.S., good jobs are scarce and it’s a lot more difficult to get a job than the persons saying, “you can always work somewhere else” tends to admit.

So, if managers are backed by law and workers are generally compliant, why is forced overtime devious and sinister? Companies benefit from forced overtime because it enables them to get more work out of workers without having to pay another worker the same costly benefits. In other words, pay only one worker the benefits to work two shifts instead of two workers, two benefit packages, to work two shifts. Also, instead of having to guarantee a second worker a full shift, the employer is able to control the amount of time worked during overtime since it’s above and beyond the regular shift. In the case of the union, every laborer was guaranteed one four hour shift if called in to work. But what if the company needed 10 hours of work. This means they either have to work with the union in order to force overtime, pay a shift of people for four hours but only have them work for two hours, or create work for a shift of people to do in order to fill up the full four hours. In both cases, the benefits to the company are clear.

What’s the solution? As I told the scheduling manager at my job, we need to pay people more money in their regular pay (i.e. a living wage or better) and either hire others for part-time or full-time work in order to fill in the schedule gaps. His reply, “that will never happen.” What can workers in the U.S. do to get back the rights we once had? Better yet, what can we do in order to make more fundamental changes to the economic system in the U.S. so that all of us begin to have true choices?