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Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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arthwollipot said:
The Enterprise Agreement, and the interim Determination, specify what hours departmental staff are permitted to work. It's a 12-hour span, during which staff are required to work 7:30 per day. Most public servants are on Flex time, which means that they can choose when their 7:30 occurs, but only within that 6am to 6pm weekday span. Hours worked outside that time are classified as overtime. Because the Service Desk has a roster, management tells us when our 7:30 is going to be each week. I'm lucky enough that my management has been flexible enough to permit me to do late shifts on an unofficially permanent basis because as I said, I like it and everybody else hates it.

So the 6am - 6pm span in the Determination collides with the 7am - 7pm span in our Service Level Agreement. And apparently nobody noticed that until now. Bureaucracy moves slow.
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Wow. Seven and a half hour days? Guaranteed payment for extra work? Rules about how much you can be made to work? Your people on your enchanted island are very lucky.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Wow. Seven and a half hour days? Guaranteed payment for extra work? Rules about how much you can be made to work? Your people on your enchanted island are very lucky.
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Yes. Australia's industrial relations laws aren't perfect, but they're still pretty darn good. Working for government helps. I recommend it. :D
 
TragicMonkey said:
Wow. Seven and a half hour days? Guaranteed payment for extra work? Rules about how much you can be made to work? Your people on your enchanted island are very lucky.
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But wait! There's more! Not only time-and-a-half for overtime, but double-time if it extends beyond a couple of hours. Work weekends? Double-time. Christmas Day? Triple time!

Then there's all the allowances and tax breaks...
 
Norman Alexander said:
But wait! There's more! Not only time-and-a-half for overtime, but double-time if it extends beyond a couple of hours. Work weekends? Double-time. Christmas Day? Triple time!

Then there's all the allowances and tax breaks...
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Yes, one complicating factor here is that overtime is mandated to be a minimum of 3 hours. I've been working either half an hour or an hour in the overtime bracket each day. Does that mean I get the extra hours? We don't know yet. I expect it will end up being pro rata-ed somehow. That's outside my job description. :D
 
arthwollipot said:
Yes, one complicating factor here is that overtime is mandated to be a minimum of 3 hours. I've been working either half an hour or an hour in the overtime bracket each day. Does that mean I get the extra hours? We don't know yet. I expect it will end up being pro rata-ed somehow. That's outside my job description. :D
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It's minimum 3 hours if it is "organised/requested by a supervisor in advance". That is, your boss asked and you agreed to work back. If you just had your head down working hard and forgot to look at the clock until late, silly bugger, that's on you.

You mentioned your agreed shift hours ended at 1900, so that fulfills the first part of the requirement. So I suspect you are owed 3 hours OT for each instance. A multi-mega, rainbow-farting crapton of pay. :D
 
Norman Alexander said:
It's minimum 3 hours if it is "organised/requested by a supervisor in advance". That is, your boss asked and you agreed to work back. If you just had your head down working hard and forgot to look at the clock until late, silly bugger, that's on you.

You mentioned your agreed shift hours ended at 1900, so that fulfills the first part of the requirement. So I suspect you are owed 3 hours OT for each instance. A multi-mega, rainbow-farting crapton of pay. :D
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Yeah, I bloody hope so. :p
 
arthwollipot said:
Um, okay, so a weird thing just happened. How can I explain this?

When we were one big superdepartment, we operated under an Enterprise Agreement for that department. When we split off, we ended up with something called a Determination, which is a temporary agreement until a new agreement could be drawn up. We've been under this agreement since June of last year.

Apparently in this Determination we can only post working hours of 6am to 6pm. Our Service Desk operates, and has always operated, from 7am to 7pm. This means that any work after 6pm is classified as overtime.

I have worked until 6:30pm or 7pm literally every week in that time.

The upshot? I may be owed a crapton of overtime. We don't quite know yet, but at this point it seems likely.

My response:

:confused: :eye-poppi :thumbsup::D
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My first thought was Microsoft licensing agreements...... I need to tidy my brain.
 
Norman Alexander said:
But wait! There's more! Not only time-and-a-half for overtime, but double-time if it extends beyond a couple of hours. Work weekends? Double-time. Christmas Day? Triple time!

Then there's all the allowances and tax breaks...
Click to expand...

In my experience, those sorts of things are common for factory assembly-line workers in the US, but not for office workers, especially those of us who are salaried, rather than hourly workers. But, we have a hodge-podge of Federal, State, and Local laws and a wide variation in company policies for whatever doesn't fall under one or more of those other laws.
 
ZirconBlue said:
In my experience, those sorts of things are common for factory assembly-line workers in the US, but not for office workers, especially those of us who are salaried, rather than hourly workers. But, we have a hodge-podge of Federal, State, and Local laws and a wide variation in company policies for whatever doesn't fall under one or more of those other laws.
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It's actually patchy here too.

Arth and I work for the public service (he for a federal PS, I for a state PS). We work under various award agreements defined specifically by laws and worked out with fairly powerful workers' union involvement. (The wars between conservatives and big unions here is another topic...)

In private businesses, usually there is a workplace agreement of some sort as part of your employment. This may be union-negotiated, or individual, and are more open to negotiation. There are also extant laws that put a framework around these work practices and agreements, primarily to do with equity, safety, and also to prevent slavery and child/elder abuse and suchlike. Pretty much the same as the USA.
 
Ugh (that's the second post I've started that way today). Almost every day we get an incident come in which is basically "We're getting spam!"

Uh, yeah. Spam happens. You should know what to do about it by now.
 
Actually, we had all forgotten for a moment that IT Security were conducting a phishing test to see how many people are using the reporting function correctly, so my complaint, in this particular instance, was invalid.
 
Request made by A to TM.
TM determined he cannot fulfill request, it can only be done by B.
TM forwards request to B.
B communicates with A about request, getting more details, etc.
B tells TM that B needs C to do X in order for B to fulfill request from A.
B waits for TM to ask C to do X.

WHY? Shouldn't TM be out of this process entirely, having handed request over to B?
 
Boss.

I actually like you as a boss but you have got, got, GOT to learn that:

"We have no assigned roles, we just do whatever the customer says."

and

"We have a contract that lays out our duties and responsibilities dot dot dot but we have to keep the customer happy or we'll lose the contract so just do whatever the customer says. "

are the same thing.
 
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Dear User: don't ask for things you don't understand. With this particular set of data, elements get updated manually over time. Which means the more recent the data is, the less accurate it is. So don't insist I run queries today for yesterday's data and then be surprised it's not all completely finalized. It's because human beings do that updating, and they don't work all night every night on the prior day's entries.
 
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