Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello, chums who are on call for their job sometimes!

We're looking at rolling it out here, and I have no idea how people are paid.

Are you paid a percentage of your salary? If so, what is it? Also, do you get more if something actually happens?

I do weekend support, I get £50 a day (£100 on bank holidays) plus time and half (double time for Bank Holidays) for any actual work I do (rounded up to the hour, and the first call, gives you a minimum of 2 hours OT, so even one 5 minute call would be 2 hours down on the time sheet)
Some of the guys do over night support, they get the same thing, but it's £20 a night (£40 on Bank Holidays)

Just to add, I've been doing it for 12 years, the £50 has stayed the same for that whole time, a few of us have argued that it should have gone up as our base rate has gone up, but that's been to no avail.

Also, when we get calls, we need to be in a position to help within 30 minutes of getting the call, so that means, a laptop with an internet connection and logged on to the work VPN, and running all software. We don't need to get into the office or anything like that.

The wife gets a fixed fee of £30 per day for on-call. Her on call is sometimes literally life and death, too.

When I was on call, we were paid a fixed £3K per year to do one week in four on call as primary, and one week in four as secondary.
Only for the more junior folks tough - once you got promoted above a certain point you lose the on-call allowance.

Oh - and you get that whether or not you're ever called.

A set amount per day standby (increases at weekends). Then 3 hours x 1.5 minimum for a callout Mon-Sat, x 2 on a Sunday, x 2 on a bank holiday play day off in lieu, x 3 over Christmas and New Year bank holidays plus day off in lieu.

I do every other weekend, my OT in 2016/17 was about £3700

I always got a fixed sum per day. I knew a guy who got an additional payment every time he got called out, but only if they completed the little Incident Report process ( log the call and write up the results ). This made sure that every call did get reported and followed up on.

Although the "payment for each call" system does set up a bit of a perverse incentive for people to let stuff slide in a way that will result in them getting a call and the extra cash. Only a real dick would do that though.

Where I used to work, it was £250 per week plus overtime at time and a half for any calls.
Now it's £0 plus £0, and will be a factor in me finding a new job.

We get an 'amount' for each day of the month (the monthly payment varies depending on how many Saturdays/Sundays/bank holidays there are in the pay month), but are only actively on-call for one week in four, and on secondary for another week in four.

It works out to be about £5K per annum for being on the rota, plus a three hour minimum payment for any time we're actually called, at whatever the prevailing overtime rate would be (either 1.5x or 2x).

Rules are that for your 'active' week you have to answer your phone 24/7, and be able to remote in or have your arse in gear to attend any of our sites, within 30 minutes. (So if we go swimming for example, and I'm on-call, I'll just spectate and read a book.)

For the secondary week it's acceptable to simply catch up with a text/missed call/etc within a reasonable sort of timeframe.

In reality I'll always answer my phone any day or week of the month if it rings, because I'm helpful like that and ultimately they are paying me to be on the rota. So I don't go all militant for the two weeks I'm neither active or secondary, and just ignore anything that looks like a work call.

It's a useful chunk of cash but can be quite restrictive for the 'active' on-call weeks (no beer!), but then again Audi S4s don't buy £220 batteries for themselves.

Tried this a few years ago and it failed. The main reason was that people were being offered shit money to be on call and OK money for turning out. This was compounded by the fact there weren't enough call outs to make giving up the weekend worth it, so nobody wanted to do it.

Wise and venerable senior management tried to use the building engineer model which is great for engineers as stuff is always going wrong in our 30-year-old buildings and they also got scheduled weeks for out of ours work as well.

So I'm on call all the year around, get no money for doing it, but I don't give up any weekend time, I fix the issue first thing Monday. Not had to be in on a weekend for 5 or more years.

I'm not allowed to get overtime pay as it's banned at my grade, but I can have time off. So If I go in its a minimum 4 hours @double time so a day off.