My company(UK) recently tried to force on-call on all engineers.
The initial wording was very restrictive, like 5 minute acknowledgement time and 15 minutes at-laptop. 24/7 for 7 days. They tried to have this implemented without any extra remuneration or perks for the on-call engineer.
On top of it possibly being very illegal, it seems very immoral to spring something like that on people that did on agree to it when they took the job.
I fought for it and I got them to change their policy in 2 mostly meaningful ways:
- It's an opt-in method
- On-call engineers get paid extra for just being on-call and get extra time off whenever they need to actually do something.
This makes sure that you only get people actually willing to do it and there is an incentive. I think it's been quite a successful program!
Luckily I didn't need to get them involved, but in the UK there are unions starting to form for tech workers, I suggest you join one like https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers
The initial wording was very restrictive, like 5 minute acknowledgement time and 15 minutes at-laptop. 24/7 for 7 days. They tried to have this implemented without any extra remuneration or perks for the on-call engineer.
On top of it possibly being very illegal, it seems very immoral to spring something like that on people that did on agree to it when they took the job.
I fought for it and I got them to change their policy in 2 mostly meaningful ways:
- It's an opt-in method
- On-call engineers get paid extra for just being on-call and get extra time off whenever they need to actually do something.
This makes sure that you only get people actually willing to do it and there is an incentive. I think it's been quite a successful program!
Luckily I didn't need to get them involved, but in the UK there are unions starting to form for tech workers, I suggest you join one like https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers