Company Tells Employees: Work ‘Voluntary’ Overtime or Go to Jail
What&#x27;s crazy when you read the company memo and the collective bargaining agreement (both linked in the article) is how the company has done a horrible job at wording the memo, that has been picked up by the news.<p>If I understand that right:<p>- the company can request overtime from its workers, first by asking for volunteers<p>- the workers collectively decided not to volunteer, as is their right<p>- the company can force workers, according to their skills and other factors, to work overtime. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be any difference in pay between voluntarily accepting overtime and being forced to work overtime (at least none that I could find in the memo or bargaining agreement, I didn&#x27;t read the law on that matter)<p>- the problem, then, seems to be that workers refuse to work overtime at all.<p>A much more reasonable headline, if I understood the story correctly, would be, &quot;workers refuse to work mandatory overtime, and courts ruled that to be a strike, which is forbidden by their collective bargaining agreement&quot;.<p>That makes a lot more sense: workers don&#x27;t want to work overtime because the conditions are bad and didn&#x27;t think it would constitute a strike, but the courts disagreed, which seems like a reasonable ruling (IMO, it could have gone both ways before the ruling).