I always struggle with this, as a teacher. I work far more than 40 hours a week, and even during “breaks”, I tend to work a lot.
The line between my teaxhing job and my teaching hobby is pretty blurry. Is writing recommendation letters part of work, or a personal favor, or community service? If I go down a rabbithole making study materials for the new SAT, as i did this winter break, is that an intellectual passion or overtime? If I help out with fixing senior schedules because the counselor screwed up, it takes overtime for me to fix them . . .but not fixing them would have made my life so much harder all year.
No one is exactly insisting that I work any overtime at all, but I am expected to be successful, and I get a LOT of autonomy from beibg super successful and helpful. And i LIKE autonomy at work. I also truly, truly enjoy much of it.
On the other hand, is overworking participating in an exploitative system? If so, is teaching different than, say, filing TPS reports? And I don’t enjoy all of it. Some is just fixing mistakes, or BS i have to do to be able to do the fun stuff.
On another note, I used to always feel bad for teachers that have to work 2-3 extra jobs to make ends meet. “Thank goodness that’s not me”. Then I realized I do have a couple part time jobs: scoring AP exams, teacher and student training, writing curricula and test items. Like, I have a whole lot of jobs, though they come and go. It was a funny sort of epiphany.
Absolutely. I’m a somewhat rare bird in that I’m classified as salaried exempt, but have a labor union contract that guarantees additional overtime payment on a per/hour rate. Basically as employers have scope-creeped the ‘exempt’ classification dubiously onto more and more job roles to avoid overtime compensation, some unions have stepped up their game to protect against that, since the government/legislatures haven’t done so.
Any job culture that tries to perpetuate the myth of getting ahead and getting noticed via sacrificial unpaid overtime is a toxic exploitive culture. The only ones smiling are the managers whose business plan depends on exploited expendable labor.
If you are on bid, a bunch of unauthorized OT cuts into your profit. If on the other hand you have a hard deadline and liquidated damages, OT may be very very necessary (and means you screwed up your bid).
I was a Canadian Federal Government employee for several decades, and this was the status of most office employees - salaried but with time-and-a-half/double-time for working overtime and holidays. All government workers below the senior management levels had union representation.
About 20 years ago I was working in tech as a salaried employee. Then some tech workers brought suit in California and the law was changed to specifically define a lot of tech workers as non-exempt. My entire team was moved from salaried to hourly. I had been staying late all the time to work on projects, but since they didn’t want to approve overtime unless it was necessary to meet a deadline, I started going home every day at 5:00 pm. Other members of the team were very upset about the change. They saw it as a form of demotion. I just enjoyed the better hours.
Now I am in a salaried position with a supervisor who brags about working weekends and expects us to be available to respond to emails on vacation. In fact, I was debating whether I should do some work today (Sunday) to get a head start on my week. This discussion has made up my mind for me. If I’m not getting paid, I might as well relax and enjoy my weekend.
“Frankly (and even worse), the general expectation is that, if you really want to get ahead in the field, you will work your ass off, which often means 60+ hour weeks.”
Depends on the company IMO, since I’ve seen people complain about working so much and wondering why they haven’t received an offer to move up yet, and if they ask their boss about it, they may or may not be ready for a promotion yet, according to their boss.
For my current job, there’s occasional voluntary overtime which is optional, but still preferred since it looks good and gives you more experience overall by staying later and helping out when needed.
Employers only pay for overtime for some employees because of one of two reasons. Either they can’t get people to do the work without paying overtime, or because it’s the law.
We used to have a saying at one place I worked: “If you don’t want to come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” It was only partly a joke.
Part of the problem is that when the owners manage the business, they naturally put in long hours to keep the doors open and build the business, so they expect their employees to do the same.
The other part of the problem is that when the owners hire managers, they put pressure on the manager to cut expenses and keep staff lean, so it works out the same for the grunt employee.
If the fixed cost of acquisition & maintenance of an incremental employee is relatively large, it’s cheaper to pay normal or even a premium (1.5x, 2x, whatever) to the existing employee(s) to do the work than it is to hire one more worker.
This is especially true for situations involving peaky demand for work. Whether that’s retail at Christmas, or bartending & serving on 3-day weekends.