13th June 2013, 07:21 AM
Crocodile Wrote:Never understood this mentality. If any job requires that you be there fifteen minutes before you are getting paid to be there, then this should be your start time and this is time you should be paid for. Most working people already dedicate a substantial amount of unpaid time toward their job and their working day, breaks, travel time, washing work clothes and cleaning equipment etc, if you think low paid workers need to dedicate another 58.25 hours for free, then knock yourself out. It's as if the eightees never ended.Not saying that I agree with the underlying principle, but it's not unusual. At my last place of employment, the call centre staff were "clocked on" when they signed into a particular piece of software on their PC which routed incoming calls to them. Given that the PCs could take 5-10 minutes at peak times to boot up and connect, this could easily add 15 minutes to the start of the working day. They were literally deemed to not be at work unless they were actually working. Taking a comfort break involved clocking off, as they had to sign out of the software to prevent incoming calls reaching their phones whilst they were away from their desk.
Not sure I like equating skilled excavators with call centre staff, but if that's how the industry sees itself...