A 40 year cycle on unpaid overtime

This is a post in my Ethics, Lazy Management, and Flawed Thinking series - see https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/11/ethics-lazy-management-and-flawed.html.

When I started in engineering, I was sent out bush for long periods of time - weeks or, in one case, months, time spent living in construction camps, cut off from friends and the things that made life worthwhile (no internet or even mobile phones back then). I made a lot of money, but it was so soul-destroying that after I had served the time of my bond (which also gave me the benefit of being paid enough to survive while I went to uni, although now, I think I would have been better off pursuing my hobbies and becoming a chippie [carpenter]), I quit, determined to leave engineering. As it turned out, I wound up having a year off, and then found myself back in engineering, in a city-based design office, fighting over overtime expectations.

The union I am in recently did a survey on unpaid overtime, and one of the options they were exploring was, effectively, peer pressure. I've always been a bit contrary, and thus I tend to resist peer pressure - more so, if the peer pressure is applied harder. And that was what happened.

The managers I was enduring at that time had obviously never come across anyone who questioned what they had taken as a given, and they floundered initially and then pushed back harder, including formalising expectations in a memo which set out the extra hours of unpaid overtime we would be expected to work. I pointed out that their expectations meant that the true hourly rate went down, which showed that they valued the increased experience and effectiveness that comes with being experienced less than simply working longer hours. (I had also declined to get into the normal expectations of doing more management, insisting on staying in a technical role: that is fairly widely accepted now, but 40 years ago it was another cause of being flummoxed.)

Most - not all - of these managers who were expecting this all had problems with their relationships, including kids. They seemed to be of the view that company profits (which, for much of this time, had no direct benefit for them - there was an end of year bonus, but it was nothing like the amount of unpaid salary/wages) were more important than their quality of life. The most insistent of these people also seemed flummoxed by anything outside of engineering - things like the move towards a more caring and inclusive society. I also saw one engineer being totally unresponsive when he saw reports that the First Gulf War had started - despite seeing some footage of pipes he had designed being blown up.

There was a similar dismissiveness when the twin towers fell on 9/11 - an attitude of "oh, yes, that's bad, but it's nothing to do with us, get back to work".

Now, as I go through another cycle of peer pressure to work unpaid overtime (which, at my current age and with my health issues is physically harmful [making it easier to get through to people that I am not available], in addition to the emotional damage), there are a few points I would like to make.

Firstly, I have profound doubts about the emotional competence of some of the people I have worked with in engineering. There are some very unseemly jokes about this, but it is a problem I saw when I was at Uni, and I consider it something that the engineering profession needs to address.

Next (second), it is time the non-physical costs of overtime - whether paid or unpaid - were addressed. It was pleasing that my union has finally started on this, but they're several decades late, really. The damage includes the obvious damage to relationships with family and friends, but also to the person doing the overtime themselves -they become emotionally crippled, withdrawn, less able to interact in a normal human fashion, in some ways damaged as people who have experienced a war - not on the frontline, perhaps, but the sacrifices made on "the home front", or in support areas of the military.

They're almost like martyrs - which brings me to the last (third) point: people want to be part of something bigger than the individual. Where that "something bigger" is something that is constructive, perhaps a charity or a progressive political party, that is good for society, and for the individual. It is likely to be something that allows the person to feel "good" about themselves, and is likely to lead to them interact more healthily with other people.

But when it is something like the profit margin of a company, or it involves coercing people to adopt a lower quality of life, it is not - it has all the human problems I mentioned above, and it also gives a false image of the company's state of being.

A few years ago, I looked at this and noticed that the average profit margins of Australian companies seemed to match the amount of unpaid overtime . . .

I suspect that a similar effect, or possibly even more pronounced effect, applies to overseas companies - especially in the economically often vaunted USA, which has a  long history of bashing and abusing workers and unions.

What is needed is for those who are able to resist this pressure to do so - politely, but persistently, and for those who have the power to influence such matters to start also addressing the second and third points I listed above.

And now it is time to get ready and go work my paid time at work :)

Postscript: 
I found some notes I had put together a few years ago, before my current manager had started and improved life very much, on "a 40 year cycle on the "utilisation rate". It overlaps the above a fair bit, but I've decided to post it as a supplement anyway.

After four decades in a professional career in an industrialised, Western nation, I have become used to a certain cycle, which I refer to as the “utilisation rate cycle”.

The utilisation rate is a simplistic measure of how much work one has done that leads directly to money coming in. So:

• time that can be directly billed to projects counts;
• time spent on things like marketing, developing workface tools and systems, preparing tenders, etc doesn’t count – being presumably of no particular value.

The justification given for this is generally along the lines that such a measure is necessary to prevent workers losing focus on the need to make money, and stay working at a high rate.

To some extent, there is merit in that: workers tend to be focused on what is directly in front of them, and, whilst they can see the immediate benefits of, say, spending three days on improving, perhaps, a computer programme, there can be a challenge to that which, in the eyes of management, is about matching the effort and quality to the minimum that the will client pay for, termed “efficiency” by the managers and termed “doing things of lesser quality and satisfaction” by the workers involved.

The inherent problem with that, certainly as I have experienced it (comments made by colleagues who have worked elsewhere suggest some companies may be more flexible on this), is that it undervalues other work that is also essential. When managers and administration staff are carrying on about doing more project work, they forget that things like marketing and submitting bids have to be done in order to have the project work in the first place.

To invent an analogy, it’s a little like focusing on making sure a car has petrol, but ignoring that it also needs oil.

In the case of utilisation rates, it leads to a cycle – which I’ve now been through, depending on how I count it, four to six times:

• there is a focus on utilisation rate, leading to increased income and worker dissatisfaction;
• suddenly work isn’t there, because of an inadequate focus on winning work, and/or profitability is down, because things like fixing or improving workplace systems aren’t done and worker morale has plummeted;
• a more reasoned and balanced approach is adopted – until someone, often a new person, with limited perspective and understanding kicks the whole cycle off again.

There is another problem with this focus, which is what is, in effect, a push to have workers do work on an unpaid basis – such as attending lectures in lunch breaks (which is the workers time, and needs to be spent on doing something other than their normal duties [not necessarily physical exercise, as some advocate] in order to refresh then to maintain productivity through the afternoon), or – to use the example given above - fix computer systems in their own time.

I once - about three decades ago, now - had a company formalise their expectations of unpaid overtime as workers gained seniority, and it worked out to keeping exactly the same, or slightly lower at some levels, hourly rate – meaning pay increases weren’t about the improved skill that comes from experience, but about simply working longer.

They were surprised and unimpressed when I declined to take part in such a fiasco, and I suspect that led to false assumptions about my motivations leading to me being shut out of opportunities later.

That particular problem has become far worse with the imported US expectation of being on call at all times.

(Incidentally, I often feel that managers are fixated on a premise that their measure is in how they handle being touch / delivering bad news – to the extent that they are utterly inept at being effective in more pleasant or “normal” conditions.)

The consequences of maintaining an elevated work intensity for decades can be substantial – in my case, it has led to me becoming “more efficient” with eating (i.e., more junk food, as I don’t have time to cook) and not exercising as I am left without the energy to do so as a result of work. On top of that, in addition to the normal results of aging, I have developed a chronic illness (diabetes) that only two managers have ever come close to understanding – one because his wife also has that disease, and the other because he asked questions.

It is important to keep in mind that this elevated intensity of work is not for a few weeks or months: it is throughout a career, which is now longer than it used to be. And along the way, the notion of having leave has – for workers at the coal face – often gone out the window. It has been two decades since I had a break longer two weeks, and the better part of one decade since I had any leave that wasn’t to suit managers (in response to a turndown in work) or taken to give me a chance to catch my breath.

There are other consequences of this approach: I’m one of those workers who has cut back on spending, yes, but I also have nothing to do with getting more people into STEM “careers”, I have second thoughts about my membership of professional associations, and, if I had my time over again, I would choose a trade, rather than a professional career – not because trades are somehow easier, but because they are slightly more honest about their harsh treatment of workers.

Not all managers are like this: I’ve had the pleasure of working for some who are both human and humane.

One doesn’t motivate workers by forcing them into mental and emotional thraldom: one motivates workers by presenting matters in a way that makes it clear their aspirations and humanity will also be respected. It is an indictment on management when that is not done – and worse if the managers in question are unable to do so.

Project Managers have a particular problem (apart from declining technical literacy), which is that they do not understand that they are one of many making demands on technical specialists, and glib comments about technical specialists having to manage their time better are not only unhelpful, but wrong when they assume that unreasonable and extreme workload expectations can be managed that way, and thus offensive and possibly defamatory.

Looking at these problems from the point of view of professionalism (which is about standards of service and accountability, NOT profitability), I consider many of these problems evidence of a major problem with groupthink.

After four decades of this, I am wondering whether we need better, more human-focused teaching of mid-level managers and Project Managers – and the latter need technical literacy, competency and experience in their field.