Overtime: what does the employee need to know?

It is difficult to find a country that is more loyal to violations of labor laws by employers than Russia. It almost daily violates the rights of employees, but most of them for many different reasons are afraid to assert their rights, allowing the chiefs to ignore the Labor Code as such. This position is fundamentally wrong and allows most private company owners to consider such behavior a norm.

Very often violations are connected with such a widespread phenomenon as overtime work. In this article, we will help you understand what the legislation understands by this term and how you can protect your rights in the case of regular processing. Often, employees simply do not pay attention to the leader's requests to stay for an hour or two in the office, considering it just a kind of force majeure that does not enter their working day, or they are embarrassed to raise the issue of paying for these "extra" hours. And for many, the emergence of such a dispute and at all threatens to lose the workplace, so they do not even try to find out their rights.

So, overtime work is absolutely any activity performed by an employee at the employer's initiative, outside the working day. That is, even the request "to stay for half an hour" is already overtime work. As for employees whose time is summed up, then in this case the slightest excess of working hours by the end of the month should be formalized as overtime work. If this does not happen, you can safely talk about breaking the law.

How should overtime be paid?

According to the current Russian legislation, the employer must pay for overtime within a few hours after the end of the official working day in the following order:

The first two hours are paid in a one and a half (this is the minimum, the employer can establish and a greater percentage) the amount from the usual salary.

The third and all subsequent hours are no less than twice the size.

At once it is necessary to explain, if you work, for example, for one day two and a half hours after work, and during the second - only half an hour, then on the first day at the double tariff only the last half hour of work will be paid. And in the second, because all the overtime work, the payment for which will go on a one and a half tariff (unless otherwise provided by the employer's decision), lasted no more than half an hour, the double payment will not have to count.

Also, employees should know and one more important point, concerning the increased size of the working day. According to the Labor Code, the employer is obliged to keep a strict and careful record of the time spent by the employee on his initiative in the workplace. In this case, overtime work should not last more than four hours in total for two days immediately following one another, or 120 hours during the year (referring to the calendar one).

Unfortunately, the reality is that a rare employee manages to avoid overtime, and for some even regular work on a day off has become the norm. But do not forget about your rights, because any work, especially if it takes away the employee's personal time, must be adequately paid for. In view of this, lawyers recommend not to be ashamed to raise questions relating to overtime pay and try to seek compliance by the employer with all the norms of Russian labor legislation.

If you are faced with the fact that your requests are ignored, you can always contact the OSH organization, where they will help not only fill in the gaps in the knowledge of the Labor Code, but also tell how to properly file a complaint and not to violate their rights.