Why is Overtime Pay such a problem in retail?

Factual Questions
1

I really don’t get it. So many companies have this idea that the earth will stop spinning if anyone works overtime. I work in a supermarket. I asked my boss why and he honestly did not know.

In my department we are allotted a certain number of man-hours per week. We’re really short-handed and last week we were 120 hours under our alottment. My boss still got in trouble because one guy worked 12 hours overtime.

Do employers have to pay more taxes or some other penalty to the government for OT?

2

For every hour I work more than 40 hours in a week I get paid time-and-a-half. That obviously is a big cost increase to my employer and reason for him to want to limit overtime.

3

I should have added that I don’t work in retail. There may be OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) limitations on work hours. My contract limits me to 12 work hours per 24 hour period, at least one weekend off in three, and a maximum of 144 overtime hours per quarter.

4

Waaaay back when I worked in a supermarket (this would have been the summer of 1992), the reason I was given was that I was a part time employee, so I didn’t get benefits like health insurance and such. I was told that if I went over that amount, I would automatically be set up with all sorts of benefits that they didn’t want to pay for-and I didn’t need to have because I was still on my parent’s insurance, etc.

5

I understand about OT pay, but still, 12 hours OT does not equal or surpass 120 hours of straight time pay.

When I asked my boss about this, the best answer he could come up with was “because it’s always been done that way”, with a shrug of his shoulders.

6

Just a WAG, but in one place I worked, overtime was seen as a symptom of bad management.

The theory is, if the manager is managering right, there will be adequate staff, which means no overtime, which is good.

It is, as you pointed out, also a question of costs, but, in your situation, you are rigth, they are still coming out ahead.

7
      • The reason is they’re greedy bastards, and have to compete with all the other greedy bastards running all the other stores. Retail and fast-food joints usually run around 1% profits (of gross, that is). The operating margins are among the slimmest of all industries.
  • It might seem like it would be easier to just let people like you who already know how to do it work overtime, but it is cheaper to just find somebody else to hire part-time than pay you time and a half. A while back the Economist reported that the average length of employment at US supermarkets was 92 days and falling, and some people had expressed fears of a “training bottleneck”. That is, it takes almost that long to learn to do everything well. (Personally, the store I work at doesn’t have any job that takes 92 days to learn, so I dunno what the Economist is talking about)
  • Fast-food joints survive not only by giving meager pay, but also streamlining training, because they know they’re going to have large turnover (300-400% per year is the last figure I heard). So they make the individual jobs as simple as possible, in order for people to learn them quickly. The pay most grocery stores offer is decreasing towards fast-food amounts, but many grocery stores have done very little in the way of streamlining training -that is, simplifying jobs. - MC
8

Look in your budget. Many managers get bonuses based on savings. If you OT budget for the week is nothing. Any OT will effect it.

Also some bonuses are set up as percentages. If your OT goes over 4% (typical number) it effects bonuses.

But here is a topper. I am punched as our company says if you don’t manage anyone you can’t be salary.

So today I walk in and we got the BIG VIRUS the NIMDA virus ALL OVER. We have a patch on the company website. Now I was told on Tuesday, NO OVERTIME what so ever.
Because I work in a hotel we laid off people due to the WTC tragedy. So our MIS person is now only at one of our 5 hotels one day a week. He calls and says can I download the patch and run it and fix the sick computers.

I told him I can but not without extra hours. He asked my boss and they said NO leave it.

Here is the weird part. I told him I took a sick day on Monday so the extra hours won’t be OT. They will just be extra hours as sick pay doesn’t count toward worked hours and OT. They said NO.

I am the systems admin/analyst, so I ran the patch on mine. Fixed it and did my work. Everyone else sat their trying to open their email for 8 hours. Then went home.

We have 20 of the 30 computers in sales and catering effected and will remain so until Friday when our MIS person comes as I’m the only one computer literate enuff to download a patch.

Can’t figure that out. The only thing I know is our GM’s incentive is tied to his savings on OT hours.

Kind of a related question

  1. Did you ever ask for more money they say no, you quit for another job and they pay the person they hired to replace your more?

  2. There is like four people in one department 2 of them quit, they don’t replace them and then they say there is no extra money to give the 2 remaining people who are doing the work of the people that left AND their own work.

Never got that either. Where DID the money go?

9

It’s not just retail: hospitals (or at least the ones here) also freak if the nurses get any overtime at all. The work still needs to be done and patients still need to be tended. We’d work through lunch but allow the half hour to be deducted from our checks. We’d clock out, then spend two hours catching up on our paperwork. We’d have to come in early, but not clock in until the official start of the shift.

Of course, management didn’t outright tell anyone to work off the clock, but their policies made it impossible to do it any other way.