No. It’s not. It’s a break. Breaks do not include work. Work is not performed on breaks. If someone is on a break, they don’t work. If you have to work during a break, it’s not really a break, now is it?
This applies to your typical non-salaried retail worker, BTW.
You go!
Gotta admit, that was pretty good. All you had to do was just tell him to take it through the proper channels and that’s all it took to show him for the whiny bint that he was.
:thumbs up:
of course, there is health care. We were not paid for the two 15 minute breaks scheduled into our day. Of course if there was an emergency, you dropped your break and went to work. But we were chronically understaffed. It is almost certain that there would be a couple emergencies every day- if peoples’ care needs are stable and the people themselves can do things (like toileting) independently, they don’t tend to stay in hospital settings. So, you are an hourly worker, you try to take your break, and get called back for an emergency. When this happens 2 or 3 times a day (because of asking to take your break now, because you didn’t get one before), over a period of weeks, you get really burnt out. But the system has little reason to fix it, because they are getting free work out of the staff. The good staff burns out, the bad staff learns to hide during breaks, or just whenever they want a cigarette. We were never fully staffed the entire time I worked in the hospital.
No. It’s probably David “pseudoRoss” Schwimmer.
Calls in queue is not an emergency.
Oh, nothing at all. I’m sure your trying to bump it up to the department manager was done purely in the interest of good sportsmanship and fair play.
I still don’t see what the threat was.
I think the threat thing presumes that you got nasty and that your offer to take it to a higher level, while technically just a suggestion that the employee go through the proper channels, could have been perceived as a threat that you’d get your pal the Boss to come down heavily on the BreakTaker. I’m not saying this IS what happened, but I have been personally offered the chance to “go through the proper channels” this way, and it was done in a way that made it seem less like a chance to make my complaint fairly… and more like a chance to be summoned to a Boss’s office for punishment. It was me against the Man, in other words, our Union having been beaten into a quivering, miserable wreck during the eighties, like all the others.
So, the question is, were you nice, or were you nasty?
Regardless, there are proper channels that the other employee ignored in his initial email to zwaldd… it wasn’t zwaldd who behaved improperly, it was the other guy. These rules and procedures have been put there for a reason, and sniping little emails between the two parties on the company networks is not the way to handle it.
Sorry, but regardless of his state of mind zwaldd acted correctly.
Well, I wouldn’t say he did anything improper by coming to me first. The way it went down was this: he complained when I first asked him to come in and I told him ‘look, we’re way behind in the queue and I need you to help out. ’ So he grumbled and came in. Then he emailed me later on how it wasn’t fair, to which I replied that in that kind of situation where we have entire regions of our statewide client calling in, breaks take a backseat to calls. To which he replied that other people get away with stuff blah blah blah (and no, I didn’t hire this infant, he was good ol’ boy’d in before I got the position). That’s when I suggested we take it up with the department manager, the implication being ‘you’re not going to change my mind and the only recourse you have is to go over my head, so lets not waste any more time with this’. At which point it probably occurred to him how ridiculous ‘my smoke break takes priority over contractual client obligations’ would sound in conference.
See, now you’re adding more to the story. You were still wrong to call him back from break, but it sounds like based on your revised tale that he started hauling in a lot of stuff that wasn’t relevant to the situation. So at that point there wasn’t anything wrong with kicking it up the ladder (presumably you did so professionally).
I once had this ass-kissing, needlebut assitant manager grill me about when I started my break, how much time I had left on it, etc. etc., during the break. I know this seems like a small thing, but I only got a few meagre minutes of peace away from this asshole, and he has to interrupt me on my time and grill me about how when I started my break. (Like he was afraid I’d take an extra 30 seconds or whatever.) I so desperately wanted to tell him that since he’d wasted about a minute of my precious break time rambling about all this stuff, that I intended to turn back the clock a minute and reclaim that extra time.
But I didn’t do that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because he and his major evil hell-witch of a boss were out of there shortly after.
I can name at least 6 people that would postpone a break to get back to work. You see, they’re on perma-break right now. Otto, crusade for someone else.
I’m not crusading for anyone. In fact if you read very carefully you’ll find I retracted a hefty portion of my vitriol. He’s a bit of a jerk for asking the guy to cut short his break but his telling the guy to take it up with the manager after the guy started complaining about unrelated stuff is fine. So all it 25% prick as opposed to the previous 100%. Get it?
Got it, had to reread to see the retraction.
I acted exactly as management would have expected me to. If I didn’t call him back from break, I would have been held at least partially responsible for missing SLA (term explanation on request). I’m sure we did miss SLA that day, and I’m sure I had to account for all staff during the outtage to cover our department’s collective ass. ‘Some employees were on break’ would not have covered it. As spooje pointed out, the employee was welcome to take his break after the crisis.
By the way, are you a smoker? My experience is that only smokers are that militant about break schedules.
That’s a web site for child labor, isn’t it? Let me get a better cite for you:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/breaks.htm
The Dept. of Labor concurs: "Federal law does not require lunch or coffee breaks. However, when employers do offer short breaks (usually lasting about 5 to 20 minutes), federal law considers the breaks work-time that must be paid. "
Meaning that these short (nonmeal) breaks are considered to be paid work time, unfortunately.
But that’s just the Federal perspective. Texas probably has a ordinance regarding this issue, but I can’t find it right now.
Nope, not a smoker, but blaming management (when you yourself were part of “managemant”) is causing your prick percentage to increase. You also didn’t say initially that the employee got the remainder of his break after the calls were out of queue. I guess my suggestion in future is that you tell the whole story the first time instead of continually adding details as the discussion progresses.
This is all very nice and informative, but has anyone figured out what the hell the OP was about?
OK, breaks over. Everybody back to work.
D’oh! Those posters I mentioned must have listed federal and California law without identifying which was which. There’s a link on the DOL site that lists state laws at least.