Jan 02 2009
Are You Paid Hourly but Required to Work Off the Clock?
I’ve had three jobs over the past eight years: the first for a major multinational insurance company in the corporate call center (five years), the second for a major midwestern retail bank in their corporate call center (two years), and the most recent for a national retail distribution firm as a route service merchandising rep. All were paid hourly at about the same rate ($10-$15/hr), and all but one had an explicit policy that banned employees from performing work when not clocked in (the last job had no such stated policy).
Yet every one of these jobs required work that could not be completed while clocked in.
Why, you might ask, would a corporation have an explicit policy against working off the clock but then turn around and coerce employees into doing just that?
One good reason is that forcing employees to work without compensation at an hourly wage job is against the law in the U.S.
WalMart recently lost a big class action suit brought by employees who were required to do inventory and clean up work for the store before and after clocking in for actual pay. In other words, the employees were required to donate a portion of their time for no pay whatsoever in order to keep the paid portion of their jobs.
Corporate-think being what it is, most companies dealt with this set-back by simply issuing a formal “No Work Off the Clock” statement to all hourly employees and including that statement of policy in an employee manual, all the while arranging the job so that almost all employees are forced to complete some of the work off the clock in order not to get fired.
At the bank, we were required to review our individual sales and then submit a review report to our supervisor “inbetween calls” on a weekly and monthly basis. Typically there was no time inbetween calls, zero, nada, none. The calls came back to back with no option for stopping or delaying them, and there was no part of the work day allotted for work other than answering calls. If the reports were not submitted it reflected negatively on performance statistics which reduced the likelihood of a raise and could even result in termination of the employee if the stats fell below a certain level. So people did the reports before work or on their breaks in order to keep their jobs.
At the insurance company we had a variety of forms, paperwork, and follow-ups we also had to complete “inbetween calls” and the same total lack of time between calls to complete these tasks. The third job, the merchandising position, didn’t even attempt to conceal the “at your own expense, on your own time” requirement. We had to print off copious materials at home without reimbursement for time or paper or ink, and check and read up to a dozen lengthy email messages four times a day for no compensation.
How do employees feel about this practice?
They hate it. At every one of these jobs the biggest complaint among new and veteran employees was the off-the-clock work requirement–followed closely by what employees perceived to be unreasonable and unrelenting job-related stress. The two were clearly related, with stress levels leading to rapid turnover within the organizations.
You may think off-the-clock work at an hourly job is no big deal and that it’s just part of the privilege of being hired, a responsibility that any good employee would be glad to take on. However, if you multiply this practice by the millions of employees forced to comply with it, it comes to a LOT of money.
That’s money that stays in the corporation’s pocket and never makes it to yours or mine.
For instance, at the insurance company, I spent about 20 minutes a day working for free so I wouldn’t lose my job, about the same amount of time at the bank, and sometimes as much as an hour a day for the merchandising job. At $15 an hour that comes to $1300 a year that was not included in my paycheck. That particular insurance company employed over 30,000 people worldwide. Assuming all their hourly employees made $15 an hour (and most made more), that’s $390 MILLION dollars a year that stayed with the corporation instead of going to the workers who performed the tasks.
Why do corporations risk legal action by continuing this chintzy practice?
Because they can. It’s profitable, it’s possible, and class action suits take years and years to bring to court.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect to be paid for the work we do. But it looks like, without intervention in the form of litigation or intervention by organized labor movements, the practice is not likely to stop any time soon.
