Travis brings up a good point. "the legality of it".
It difficult to implement a policiy, that is not 100% legal. If not
documented, how can one be held accountable for following it. If its
documented then you just gave your employee the abilty to win a law suit
agaisnt you, as you've admitted the policy and practice of it. So to
effectively launch an on-call policy, one must first consider the legal
ramifications and account for them. Take note that it is not necessarilly
a requirement to pay full minimum wage for on-call duty. Just like the
airlines that pay a reduced wage when they are on-call. However,
conflicting law infers that if an employee is on-call, they must be paid for
being on-call even if they are not performing work and jsut on standby. The
exact interpretation of these law really depends on what duties they have
when they are on-call. Do they just work when an insodent comes in? Are
they required to comprmise their life in any way while in on-call status?
And how will this apply? Again questions best answered by legal council
knowledgable with the laws of your state, as state employment law usually
has further restrictions.
We found that the person that took/qualified the off-hour service request
should not necessarilly be the same person that actually went onsite to do
the repair work. Expecially if they don't get paid to do it, or more so if
they do get paid overtime. If you pay overtime, they go onsite when they may
not normally have to, to rake up some extra top dollar pay. If you don't
pay, then they are likely to respond slower to outages, such as wait until
morning to investigate instead of when it actually happens at night. And
what do you do when, an on-call tech responds 10 hours late, because they
went away with their family anyway? How would you know, since you left it up
to someone else to monitor when outages occured. By the time you find out
that the tech responded to slow (the next day), its to late and nothing you
can do able it to correct it sooner. And can you complain when they were
expected to do it for free?
What I do is I take the off-hours monitoring duty personally, so I can
qualify when a site visit is required or not on the weekend. Then I call the
tech on-call and make them go out, if needed. I often do the off-hour
repair personally, jsut because I want to save on over-time pay, and want
the techs to get some rest and fun, because I work them hard during the
week, and they need the rest. I recently offloaded the night monitoring to
one of our techs that I trust, in trade that he would not have to do the
truck rolls on the week end. But I always have a different tech responsible
for checking for outages in the mornings than the tech on night on-call duty
so I have appropriate checks and balances.
I have not found a perfect system yet, jsut because we do not have enough
staff to share the duty adequately and still ahve checks and balances, where
there is a second person on-call in case the first person missed it. What
I plan to do is to start scheduling overlapping schedules so more of the day
is handled by paid staff, and less time to be covered by on-call duty.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: "Travis Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 10:28 AM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] on call staff
Hi,
That's not legal (at least not in Idaho). Someone on salary still can only
work 40 hours per week unless they are a "manager", meaning they have 3
people "under" them, or they are a "professional" position (lawyer,
doctor, etc.).
One of my friends owns a drafting company. Had everyone on Salary for 2
years and was working them 50+ hours per week. They fired a guy and so he
turned them into the Dept Labor. After the audit, they had to pay back
overtime to everyone (costing them almost $40,000 for the 2 year period).
We have guys on call. If they have to go after hours, we give them time
off during the payperiod so they aren't over 40 hours.
Travis
Microserv
David E. Smith wrote:
chris cooper wrote:
How do the rest of you compensate tech staff for on call duties? We
have an on call tech that monitors network remotely throughout weekend
and is responsible for rolling to tower/major customer in case of
outage.
Put 'em on salary, that way you can work them as much as you want without
guilt. ;)
I'm not a tower climber, but I'm the one on-call pretty much all the
time. In the event of a big problem, I'll usually triage it (drive to the
tower, see if it's just a power outage or something else I can't easily
fix), and if it's something for which we need the tower guy, I call him
(and he gets normal overtime pay).
David Smith
MVN.net
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