Originally Posted By: Shannow
Originally Posted By: Nyogtha
I was one on salary + sliding scale overtime (colloqially referred to as
Chinese Overtime)
Had to google it, as the resource is broken...would jump at that from my P.O.V.
Have been on "Balance time" with a 70 hour maximum balance for a decade and a half...the hours over 70 evaporate. Any week where you work shorter hours comes off the balance. (actually it was a 35 hour balance until 3 years ago).
There were no OSHA fatigue standards back then; my personal record was 6 days with 6 hours sleep covering all the work my company had at the Shell Norco facility docks for a week in late spring of 1987 when I was 24 years old. The times this really worked in our favor is when assigned to a lightering, where tankers too large to dock in the US would park about 100 miles offshore and offload to multiple smaller capacity tankers, some purpose built for the job. Then you got to charge every clock hour starting with choppering out to the mothership or riding the first lightering tanker out, generally got a cabin to use on the mothership, got served all meals on the mothership and still got to charge meal per diems but the cuisine was quite variable by nationality of officers and crew.
I would have gladly traded for a straight night shift job with time-and-a-half but unemployment was 20% to 25% locally during the oil & gas domestic crash in those years. This line of work was a godsend ghat let me pull myself out of hand to mouth living and finish my education. We were on a bi-weekly pay period so sliding scale overtime didn't kick in until you had worked over 80 hours in the two week pay period. Back then my basic salary was $1500 / month plus the sliding scale overtime. Sometimes if your office didn't land many contracts you could skate doing well less than 80 hours in two weeks but that was a bad sign layoffs were around the corner. Two of the four very close calls with death or serious permanent bodily injury I've had in my life were while I was on the job in this line of work.
I finished my degree and started at double that pay as an engineer, but was never reimbursed for my overtime again for the rest of my career. Sometimes I would earn bonuses and peak performance awards but never again paid beyond salary for hours worked.