It’s a busy time at the CBC with the start of a new season and a federal election campaign. We would like to remind you about your rights when it comes to working overtime.
If you have a daily schedule, you get time-and-a-half for every quarter hour worked beyond 7.75 hours in a day. You need the ok from an authorized supervisor before working overtime. If that supervisor expects you to work through your meal break and continue to the end of your scheduled day, that counts as overtime and you should claim it.
If you have a weekly schedule, that means you are able to choose the hours you work on your scheduled days. You get time-and-a-half for any hours?you work?beyond 38.75 hours in the week. Management does not have the right to tell you when to begin or end your shift, and cannot tell you to stay home on one of your scheduled days to make up for a long day you may have worked earlier in the week.
If you are self-assigning, you are not eligible for an overtime payment. However, you should have full control over your schedule and be able to take time off to compensate for long days and/or long weeks. If you don’t truly have that flexibility, you are probably not appropriately self-assigning and should get in touch with the Guild. And if you have that flexibility in theory but not in practice because your workload is too heavy, you can negotiate a workload agreement with management that reduces your load, pays you more, or some other mutually acceptable alternative. (Click here for a guide to workload agreements: http://www.cmg.ca/cbcbranchworkloadguideEN.shtml ).
Some employees also negotiate overtime buy-outs and pre-payments for overtime. A pre-payment involves estimating how much overtime you will work and getting the overtime pay up front. Continue to log your overtime hours on your time card and, if you end up working more than the time for which you were compensated, claim the difference.
Buy-outs, on the other hand, involve coming to an agreement on an estimated amount of overtime and receiving payment for that agreed amound of time. You can’t claim more compensation, even if you are required to work more overtime than anticipated. For this reason, the Guild doesn’t recommend that members agree to overtime buy-outs.
For more information, get in touch with the Guild (info@cmg.ca) at 416-591-5333 or 1-800-465-4149.