g.man wrote:

...but by your own admission you are not contracted to work forty hours per week. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have never signed any contract at all since starting this job. If this is indeed the case then I think you'll be lucky if they don't just fire you and get some other poor bastard in to do the hours they want. You seem to be on rather a sticky wicket here. good luck g.man

But a precedent has been set by him doing those hours and being paid for them for 'x' amount of months.
They can't just fire him because no piece of paper has been signed. I can't actually recall ever signing a contract myself.

I'm not saying that your perfect job is going to fall in your lap or that you'll find it very quickly even if you put in considerable effort to do so but, if there's something out there that you might enjoy doing as a vocation, you can make it happen, as long as your expectations are reasonable, of course.

I'm not earning much of a living at the moment, doing what I do, but I love every second of it and would never set foot in an menial office job again, not for any salary.  It's taken a hell of a lot of blood, sweat and tears even to get to where I am now though, tbf.

I'm no expert but there are all kinds of laws to protect against these things contracts or not. As pantyfire said a precedent has been set and as far as I'm aware if you can prove hours and pay for a certain period this is as good as a contract. As has been already said join a union contact your representatives and find out the facts, forewarned is forarmed.

igorgetmeabrain wrote:

Or you could get a job that you actually enjoy? Work-life balance is important, whatever you do, but no reason why both parts of your life can't be rewarding and fulfilling.

Someone has to do the work that no one enjoys though. Its not an option for everyone. 

Elm's point of view is very naive. If you're a self-employed portrait painter or something then yeah, the job takes as long as it takes. If you're in an menial office job, you generally have work to do all the time. On the off chance you complete your work, you get sent to help somewhere else or you get given more work. Do you carry on with that until its done? With most jobs I've had of this type, its more likely that you have more work than can possibly be done even working a 7 day week. If its once in a while, that's one thing. But its all the time. 

Unless the employer has the luxury of employing people in a desirable field, they can't expect people to hand their lives over to in exchange for a pittance.

I don't; but similarly, why should people pay their staff if they're not working?  In the same way I think it's inefficient and inappropriate to pay people to sit in work when they're not doing anything, I think it's inefficient and inappropriate to not pay people to work longer, if you see what I mean.  Why do we have to specify 40 hours at all?  It just doesn't seem the best way to decide how much someone should work, as the amount of work someone can get done in 40 hours is very abstract.

I mean, I don't do this sort of job; I've worked anything between about 10 and 90 hours a week depending on what's been required, but that's the nature of my job and I obviously understood that when I took it.  Perhaps I am being cripplingly naive, but doesn't my idea have some sort of merit?  That being that you contract someone to do a job, and that job has a list of duties, and they work whatever they think is appropriate to get that job done, rather than an arbitrary number of hours.

I've seen it in microcosm with extra duties we have at work.  Some people can crack them out in an hour or 2 during a normal working day, and maybe do a little bit of work at home.  Others demand days off flying to spend 10+ hours working on the same size of task during normal work hours.  Both produce the same result.

I don't mean for a second to be insulting to anyone, and I can obviously see how this could be used by unscrupulous managers to just cut down on staff and up the number of duties that someone else has to do, letting the "as many hours as required" bit cover them for all sorts of abuses, but if the amount of work was sensible then I could see it working.  It won't work for hours-based jobs like Dante's, but it could for others.  


We sometimes have programmed "office days."  Not weekends, not days off, but days where you're not required to fly.  When we do fly, we have enough breaks that I manage to get absolutely everything extra I need to do (including our mandated 3 x 30 mins of exercise in work time per week) without needing extra days.  So when I get an office day, I have literally nothing to do. I have to drive 45 mins in to work because some other people aren't necessarily as efficient, and need an extra day to do their extra duties because they sit in front of the TV during their breaks rather than doing a bit of extra work then.  Due to their work ethic, I get extra days I don't want or need at work, so I think this whole concept is just riling me a bit right now.

Apologies for ramble, but I hope you see what I mean.

Elmlea wrote:

Both produce the same result. I don't mean for a second to be insulting to anyone, and I can obviously see how this could be used by unscrupulous managers to just cut down on staff and up the number of duties that someone else has to do, letting the "as many hours as required" bit cover them for all sorts of abuses, but if the amount of work was sensible then I could see it working.

I'd imagine it would be abused more often than not. It's in the employer's interest to squeeze in as much as they can get away with calling a 'sensible' amount of work.

We sometimes have programmed "office days."  Not weekends, not days off, but days where you're not required to fly.  When we do fly, we have enough breaks that I manage to get absolutely everything extra I need to do (including our mandated 3 x 30 mins of exercise in work time per week) without needing extra days.  So when I get an office day, I have literally nothing to do. I have to drive 45 mins in to work because some other people aren't necessarily as efficient, and need an extra day to do their extra duties because they sit in front of the TV during their breaks rather than doing a bit of extra work then.  Due to their work ethic, I get extra days I don't want or need at work, so I think this whole concept is just riling me a bit right now. Apologies for ramble, but I hope you see what I mean.

You're attacking people for using their breaks as breaks and calling them inefficient and lazy. Perhaps they'd rather do the office day thing and get the work done that way - they still do it. If you should be pissed off at anyone it should be those who've decided you have to go into the office when you've already done your work. So yes, perhaps if you've done everything there should be a way of letting them know and being exempt from those office days, but those folks watching TV on their breaks are not the ones making you go in.

The problem here is that you get paid for your time not a finished product. So elm isn't forced to go in on his time off its scheduled time that's part of his working hours which he is paid for. He should stop working through his breaks which are there for a reason and do his work in the scheduled tome like his colleagues. The opposite is true for moto his work needs to organise the work needed doing and staff and pay appropriately. Employment law is there for a reason, the way some people are talking we'll be back to the work houses and debtors prison soon.

In my job, we have such mental contracts, and as teachers are such, they're constantly being negotiated with. I am in that camp where I do get unpaid over time- and it is unbalanced as an English teacher has more marking than, say, a PE teacher.

Remember that holidays don't factor into overtime - that's already covered as part of my salary. But it would be ridiculous for me to cut down to a 40 hour week, because otherwise there wouldn't be extra curricular activities, no school newspaper, no Saturday morning football team, and to be honest, that's the part of the job I love.

But I do think that in jobs that aren't as specialised as this, you really should be paid for what you work. It's logical, innit?

I'd like to know what cuts the management are taking from the top down first and when I've found the top brass have 20% knocked off I'd think about signing up.

mk64 wrote:

If you don't work those hours moto then a graduate student probably will. Businesses also change and can be rapidly. If the 40 hours a week is all your business can afford then would you prefer to work a couple of extra hours for your company to stay afloat and keep your job or make them pay you the extra and go under? Hypothetical like..

Which is fine on paper if you're a bean counter, but a graduate probably wouldn't be able to do Moto's job in the same time.

monkey wrote:

mk64 wrote:

If the 40 hours a week is all your business can afford then would you prefer to work a couple of extra hours for your company to stay afloat and keep your job or make them pay you the extra and go under?

The Royal Mail wouldn't be allowed to go under.

I'm not at the Royal Mail anymore, I wish I still was...

We currently have 250 full time staff and 200 cleaners (Feb-Nov), out of those 250 staff we have some on salary, some on hourly, some that are expected to do extra hours and some that get TOIL.

I am unique here in that I am the only person doing this job hence they want me here all the time, all the other depts have multiple staff so there is cover etc.

The case is simple, there aren't enough people here doing my job so I am constantly busy.

If they had their way everybody would be on salary and expected to work more hours than contracted for, at 12 hours each that is 13,000 hours a month they'd be getting for nothing...

I'd be surprised if he knew, MK. Most studio staff are kept well away from the financial side of things. 

<derail>
It's not in every place, but there's occasionally an 'Us' vs. 'Them' attitude in some companies between the designers and the suits. It's unfortunate when it happens, because it's people blurring the lines between 'management' and 'project management'. Worst example of it I've heard of was when a well-regarded company in town took the staff for a snowboarding weekend (back when the country had money). All the suits flew business class. All the designers flew economy. If that really happened, then it was a spectacularly dumb move.
</derail>

We're not privvy to the accounts but the problem is that this is a family run business and a notoriously difficult to work for family. They don't care about sacking people for no reason, they don't care about outside lives. I have never worked in a place where moral is so low...

Moto70 wrote:

We're not privvy to the accounts but the problem is that this is a family run business and a notoriously difficult to work for family. They don't care about sacking people for no reason, they don't care about outside lives. I have never worked in a place where moral is so low...

Has anyone tried to speak to them about it?

I suggest you keep a note of everything dodgy they do and then blackmail them.

mk64 wrote:

Think before you speak. If he does it then it sets a precedent. If he does it then others will demand it. Before long the hundred people in his company are being paid an extra 8 hours a week. That quite easily might not be sstainable.

First, that's not the responsibility of the individual employee who, as has been said, is probably not privy to the accounts (the company may be doing well and just taking the piss). Second, if you start down that road where does it end? Why not work another 8 hours for free so that the company can lay off a few people and save some more money? Good for business, no?