Saturday, September 22, 2012

the refusal to grant overtime

YB has been very generous in allowing me to work extra hours, but the company's generosity has limits: I'm not to exceed 40 hours per week. This is probably because the company doesn't want to pay its employees for overtime work, which is a bit disappointing.

I work a maximum of twenty-six hours per week as a tutor, now that we're off the intensive summer schedule and are back on the regular fall/winter/spring schedule. This avails me of fourteen extra work hours. I had modestly told my bosses that I could give them an extra eight hours or so of my time, but I later wrote one boss to say I had low-balled that figure, and could give up to sixteen. He responded that he was glad I'd be able to contribute so much time, but that I had to watch the forty-hour ceiling.

After a few days of proofing, it became obvious to me that I would need more than fourteen hours per week to complete the assigned tasks: some of YB's textbook manuscripts are very text-heavy, and I'm constantly fact-checking them (the maximum velocity of land snails comes to mind; our text claimed they move at two feet per hour, but in truth they're around seventy times faster). I wrote my boss again, and he said that, personally, he didn't care whether I worked an extra 100 hours a week, but that I'd have to clear the arrangement with his superior, one of the co-founders of YB.

So I'm going to write the Big Boss and see what can be arranged. I'm hoping for something like comp time to catch my spillover hours: roll those extra hours over into the next pay period, thus avoiding the overtime issue. It bugs me that YB doesn't want to offer overtime to its workers (perhaps part of the reason why our teacher retention rates are so poor), but them's the breaks.


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5 comments:

Charles said...

I think you may have left an important element out of your fact checking: are we talking an African land snail or a European land snail here?

Kevin Kim said...

I don't know that!!

Bratfink said...

Years ago I worked for Kmart. Was hired as a part-time employee, but they regularly scheduled me at 35+ hours a week, which is what the full-time people worked.

But as a 'part-time employee' they didn't have to pay me any benefits.

This shit regularly goes on in retail. I think it must happen other places too.

They are all assholes.

Kevin Kim said...

Brat,

Agreed re: the ulterior motives behind part-time work. What boss actually wants to give benefits to his workers? Ew, gross.

John from Daejeon said...

Don't forget my favorites, racer snails. If you are fast enough, you can catch one at about 1:09 in the linked video.

Here's a really great, rarely seen, interview with in which the racer snail arrives in the "Auf Los Geht's Los" studio with Tami and Barret at 4:09. The stunt at the 14:00 mark is truly impressive and looks awfully dangerous to put a kid through without any sort of safety measures in sight.