Over fifteen years ago, I was (and still am) working with people with disabilities in a community home. It’s a great job for those who like it and a terrible one for those who don’t, so any staff you meet are either very new or long-term like me. The turnover rate of staff is high, and replacement staff is slow to be hired, meaning you often find shifts not covered straight away. This is an industry where simply not having a shift filled isn’t an option, particularly where I work: in a house with a single day staff and a single night staff, each working twelve shifts on a seven-day roster spread over two weeks.
There are some strict rules regarding the hours you can work. This is intended to avoid burnout, but it’s more used to keep a rein of overtime. You can’t demand overtime, but if they require you to work longer, they can’t not pay you overtime.
Also worth noting is that the people we work with are vulnerable, meaning they cannot be left unsupervised. Long story short, you can’t go home until your replacement arrives.
Back in the early 2000s, we were having problems locating staff, so we had a lot of people working overtime and a lot of fresh faces appearing and disappearing.
The house I worked in wasn’t difficult in particular. We had four adults with intellectual disabilities, but there was no support, by which I mean the worker there had to fend for themselves. There was no supervisor in the next building; they were miles and miles away.
I’d frequently have to stay back half an hour or an hour waiting for staff to come and replace me. I was less than happy with the way it was handled each time I called the office to tell them, “The night staff hasn’t arrived. Do you know who is booked?” I’d get the reply, “We are still looking. How late can you stay?”
The obvious answer was, “Until I’m replaced,” but what I often said was, “I prefer not to stay after the end of my shift, but that doesn’t seem to matter now, so I’ll stay here until someone comes.”
Each time a new face arrived, I’d give them all the information they’d need for the shift, introduce them, walk them through their duties, etc. This would take twenty to thirty minutes.
My point is that I don’t just jump ship when a staff member arrives to replace me. This is someone’s home, and I like them, so I’m not going to leave them in the hands of someone uninformed.
Cut to “that weekend”.
My roster had me working twelve-hour days Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Come Friday night, my replacement didn’t arrive. I waited. I sent a text message to the supervisor after fifteen minutes, and then I called after thirty. I left a message, and when they eventually called back — around 10:00 pm, an hour after I was meant to finish — I could tell they had not found a replacement. I told them I’d stay until they did.
Come 11:00, they called and said they simply couldn’t find a replacement. They offered a “deal”: if I stayed and did the night shift, I could take the next shift off. “It’s pretty even, so you won’t miss out,” they said. Then, they changed their tone and said, “It’s not really a request; we have no other option. Treat this as a direction.”
I reminded them that it was a passive house — meaning you got half the hourly rate after midnight, but you could sleep in the bed provided — so I’d actually be taking a pay cut.
They didn’t know what else they could do, so I made a suggestion.
I’d stay and do the night shift, but I wasn’t going to give up my next shift. I was going to do that one, as well. They agreed. It meant they didn’t need to find a replacement for me in the morning, so they thought it was a good deal for them.
It was, however, an even better deal for me.
It took a few emails over the weekend with the union to sort out the particulars.
Once I couldn’t leave my worksite because of a lack of replacement, I was on overtime. As this overtime was because of a direction — not voluntary — it remained in place until I went home. Because I didn’t agree to drop my following day shift, my overtime continued until I ended on Saturday night. The upshot was that working thirty-six hours in a row resulted in the equivalent of sixty hours of pay.
I was the first person to, as they say, “pull this stunt,” and word got around that if you didn’t get replaced, you were actually the person who was in a position of power.
It didn’t take long until the department put a little more effort into training and employing extra staff, so something like this never happened again.
Not at least, to me.
