On-Call and Getting Paid

There was a good article in the Public Employees Press regarding a group of caseworkers at Coney Island Hospital.

The caseworkers were placed on a rotating schedule and were required to be “on-call” after work hours without compensation. They would only get paid if they were called in. Each of them shared this responsibility and had to carry a beeper from 5 pm to 9 pm.

Leave it to the city to find “beepers”.

I remember the first time I was on-call and carried a beeper. I worked for a private company that took care of public safety and private radio systems and now  I was the after-hours emergency guy. When the system goes down, I get beeped and am the “first responder” to get things back on the air. Like a “radio doctor” waiting for that call where, with my parts and meters and skill, get critical first responder system back up so the cops and firefighters can get their emergency calls again.

Well, that fun didn’t last too long. You had expected response times – call back within 15 minutes, respond within an hour, have it fixed in no longer than 4 hours. Call back in 15 minutes when you had no cellphone? That means find a phone and hope you had change if it was a pay phone. Forget what you were doing… Saturday night dinner out? Wrap it up and take it to go. On the LIE? – get off next stop and find a gas station, diner, or somewhere that might have a working pay phone…

Your travel was restricted – couldn’t go anywhere where it would take more than an hour to go home and drop off wife/kids/friends if you were out, and get to the location within that hour.

Until you called “service” you wouldn’t know what the call was about. Sometimes it was legit – a system was down and needed immediate service. But more often than not it wasn’t. Get off the LIE, at a gas station pay phone, call the answering service, get the info and then call the customer/complainant. “I have a portable radio and need a replacement battery now”, at three pm on a Sunday. I got called out for a PD car out of service at 11 pm one Saturday night due to an “unknown” radio problem. I got there and found a cop that said he called because he was bored and wanted someone to talk to. He proceeded to explain how difficult it was to find a place to take a dump at 3 in the morning. The riveting conversation continued through other exciting topics while I did a performance check on his radio system anyway. By 12:30 am I was done with the checkup and he was happy with the company. True story.

Although the caseworkers’ after-hours calls may be more important, the fact that they were REQUIRED to carry them as part of their duties it what the problem is. I don’t know of any city union employee that is required to be on-call without compensation as specified in the contract.

My private company paid us 4 hours overtime just for carrying the beeper. Then, if we got called, we got 4 hours overtime for each legitimate call we responded to, even if we only needed an hour or two to fix it. Nothing for the “need a battery now” or “it can wait till Monday” notifications – even if you had to convince the drug dealer at the payphone that you’ll be quick.

The Citywide Contract has provisions that address some of this. In Section 9, if you are called in when you are not working, if you are ordered to come in you get a minimum of 4 hours paid in cash overtime. If you “voluntarily” come in, you get straight time compensatory time… so many of my employees had to be “ordered to come in involuntarily”… But that doesn’t clearly address anything about carrying a “beeper” and being on-call. That is under Sections 11 and 12 respectively. Section 11 talks about performing involuntary standby in your home and Section 12 allows you to travel if you carry a beeper.

This is where the caseworker’s had a stance. They were “…required, ordered and/or scheduled on an involuntary basis to standby…” but were not paid “…in cash for such time on the basis of one-half (1/2) hour paid overtime for each hour of standby time.” That’s pretty good money. So, for the caseworkers, being on-call from 5 pm to 9 am the next day, they should have been paid (by my rough calculations) 8 hours overtime (16 divided by 2) for each day they “carried the beeper”.

Now, as a manager, you have no such protections. It is not pretty. For years I was required to answer after-hours emergency calls and then find someone to come in who would be paid. It wasn’t bad for a while – I’m used to this particular business and it comes with the territory. But as the city’s systems expanded and became more complicated, I was getting tons of after-hours calls. If I couldn’t get someone to come in then I would have to respond myself. I was not authorized to put anyone on call so I had to institute a 24 hour operation. Even with that I was still getting after-hours calls – of course without any additional compensation. I know of a few managers, including one CIO who stepped down, who took another job because of the excessive after-hours demands placed on managers. It will wear you down.

If you’re asked to be on call, carry a beeper, respond to work phone calls, or even answer work calls on your personal phone after hours and you’re covered by a union, make sure you’re aware of the rules and make sure you’re compensated properly. Knowledge is power – and maybe extra green in your pocket.

Comments and questions are welcomed below.