Reply to post: Re: In an emergency

Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours

Mark Ruit

Re: In an emergency

Many years ago I worked allegedly standard hours as a support technician for a group which provided 24/7 gatekeeper service to manufacturing. I used to get called in fairly regularly but the group manager denied both payment or TOIL and and even refused recompense of my telephone rental (this was long before mobile telephony). The same manager never took an outside call to my knowledge, but his rental was paid.

Then I moved house, from ~2 miles from the factory to ~25 miles (and we sold our car as part of the financing). I spun the tale (credible in those days) that there was an issue which prevented me taking over the phone contract,. The inevitable crash took about three weeks: the group's set-up (not IT) went out of spec, test results were meaningless, and production shut down on the Saturday night.

Monday morning was interesting. I came out of it with an agreement for time-and-half payment (not TOIL) for call-ins on weekdays and double-time for Sundays (always including travel time), coverage of taxi fares both ways, and my phone rental fully paid. And the boss was moved-on about a year later.

The extra money did help us get on top of our new mortgage a bit quicker...

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