It's the Principle of the thing!

I'm jumping the gun on this one. Absolutely nothing has happened - yet. But, I suspect it's only a matter of time, and I want to think this stuff out beforehand, and have some ideas tucked away in my head just in case.

A work situation came up over the weekend. One of our phlebotomists was put on "forced overtime". Although it's pretty self-explanatory, I'll drop the way of things as I *used* to know them.

First of all, most of us are merit employees. That means we are under contract to work certain hours for certain pay. In my case, my contract states I work the a.m. phlebotomy shift, 5:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. 20 scheduled hours per week. There's nothing in the contract that states we can be pushed into anything other than our contracted schedules.

However, we *can* work overtime on any shift; they have to ask us and we have to agree to work. No problem there. And, also in place is a worksheet each month that shows where the holes are in the p.m. schedule. The unwritten (as far as I know) rule states that if we don't initial that sheet stating we *don't* want those hours gives them the right to schedule us in those slots. Again, no problem - if I don't sign the sheet because I forgot, or just plain messed up, then I'm willing to do the shift.

However, Sarah was approached by Kathy on Thursday to work a "forced overtime" shift on Sunday evening. Sarah is also an a.m. phleb, and had signed off on the p.m. list that she didn't want/ or couldn't work ths shift. But, Kathy told her she had to - Kathy was invoking the forced overtime rule. Sarah protested that she didn't want to work, was basically told, 'too bad'. Now, Sarah has a husband who works nights, has a little boy, and she is a full time nursing student besides, and also works another part time job a couple days a week. She really doesn't have time to do anything else, not to mention she really would like to see her family once in awhile!

So, her husband pitched a fit, and she then called Kathy and told her this was just not going to work for the reasons I stated above. Kathy told her if she did not do the shift, she'd be brought in for a reprimand; that Sarah should be grateful that the U had bent over backwards to accomodate her class schedule and all. Sarah got on the computer and looked up University policy and it stated that no U employee was required to work overtime unless the employee chose to do so. She told this to Kathy, and Kathy was not pleased. I told her to call Kathy's boss, who also stated that it was okay to do forced overtime.

Sarah is going to meet with a union rep tomorrow to determine an official university policy. We're all anxious to hear the results. As I told one of the others, it would help if we had regular staff meetings so these things could be brought into the open instead of everyone worrying behind the scenes.

For me, it's the principle of the thing. I have to decide how strongly I feel about this, because if suddenly seniority plays no part any longer, that means my name will come up for a forced overtime shift eventually, too. And, I set my schedules a month in advance, thus I can not and will not change my life outside my contracted work because there's a hole in a schedule someplace. Tough. I spent too many years on the corporate ladder to start that crap over again. My job is my job...it's not my life.

But I don't want to be rash about something either. I do like my job, but if it comes right down to it, I suspect I will quit if need be. Who knows? That's why I want to have this all thought out before it potentially happens.