
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Not paying for the overtime? Wow, that is really shitty.
In a previous role I provided out-of-hours and on-call support and the official company policy was to book extra work as overtime in the first instance, or take time off in lieu (TOIL). After booking my first batch of out-of-hours overtime my manager said there wasn't a budget for this so I'd have to take it as TOIL. I checked for the company's policy document on this to see how much TOIL to take - the equivalent of the hours worked as overtime, or the equivalent of the hours worked at the overtime rate, which was at time and a half. There was nothing in the document to specify what TOIL to take, so I booked it as equivalent to the overtime rate.
Naturally my manager queried this, so I explained that if the company were unwilling to pay me, say, four and a half hours pay for three hours overtime at time and a half, then they would need to give me four and a half hours of time off in lieu. I referred him to the policy document and said it wasn't detailed in there so I'd interpreted it at face value, but that I was more than happy to go and have a chat with my union representative to get their take on it. My manager said it was fine and that's how I booked my TOIL for over five years.