| Especially when I was younger I worked a lot of hourly student-type jobs and since I've had a "real job" I've never been too far away from 24x7x365 ops. The primary source of OT is stuff like "my kid's sick so I'm not coming in" and suddenly two guys work an extra half shift, one is staying in late the next coming in early, or at least as many hours as they can to help out. The next one is medical and training appointments and any non-nose to the grindstone official activity. So if mandatory 2-hour diversity class is today, "someone" is covering for 2 hours via OT, and/or the class attender is coming in on her day off for 2 paid overtime hours. A big problem I can imagine with BART is the busy customer times are two big humps in morning and evening rush hour. Most people can't/won't work split shifts, which adds to the excitement. Depending how your departmental SLAs are financially structured, you may come out far ahead by spending an extra $100K/yr on overtime than by toughing it out and letting things fall apart. Not to mention the effect on personnel. I suppose it varies by location, but usually a group of workers will always have some subgroup unable or unwilling to work overtime, but Usually the subgroup willing to soak up any hours will adsorb the slack before people start burning out. This is also complicated by things like holiday policies. Some places I've worked paid overtime for 40+ in addition to double time for holidays providing a net pay rate of 2.5 your current rate and informally your holiday bonus is either getting the day off, or coming into the 24x365 operations dept for 2.5x pay. Many years (decades) ago, I was in operations and one of my last days of work before starting a promoted job was earning something like $60/hr on the 4th of July (back when gas was under a buck, to provide some inflation scale) There are quite a few holidays... Just working every other one I could see someone accumulating quite a bit of OT, before unscheduled overtime like coverage for sick people begins. |