Standby/On Call Rates

LegacyUser

Hi,

Looking for advice on the rates currently being paid by my employer for standby and on call. I work in IT Services and have to travel to different customer sites to repair IT equipment. For example, retail, servers, networking etc. etc.

My employer pays the following:

Standby - 23 euro for a block of 8 hours. (This works out at less than 2 Euro per hour)
Callout - 75 euro but it's supposed to cover the first 2 hours! (kinda pointless in my book)
Overtime is paid at 1.5 for the first 4 hours and double after that for monday to Saturday with Sunday being double all day.

Does this fall in line with other IT companies that require staff to be on call?
Our on call covers Ireland and there's always a possibility of a call coming in for Donegal at 3am and (depending on the contract) we would be expected to travel there from Dublin.

Myself, I think these rates are far below the norm.
Opinions

Borzoi

In a different sectorbut the principle is the same.

On call standby is about 20% of a typical weeks wage.
Call out is x1.5 or x2 depending on time of day or weekend with minimum 2 hour payment. Hours worked on call can't be allowed to interfere with regular weeks payment, ie if you've been on site all night and can't start the following day at your regular 9am, you still get paid as if you did.

The allowance can vary between companies, if getting called out is rare, the allowance should be more, as you're not getting the OT payments but still putting life on hold.

_Brian

Last time I worked on call (different industry and 25years ago) there was no on all payment and the typical call net pay was £13 for 3-4 hours work.

We were on call 6pm to 8am every third week including 6pm Friday to 8 Monday

If we didn’t like that we could leave.

dennyk

The standby payment seems a bit low, depending on their availability requirements. How long do you have to respond to a call-out? If it's such a short time that you can't do anything but sit at home by the phone waiting for calls, you really ought to be paid more. If you just have to respond and be ready to set off within, say, an hour of receiving a call, so you can go out and run errands or whatnot as long as you have your phone on you, then a lower rate might be fair enough.

Fortunately I'm not on call in my current role. At a previous job, though, we had an on-call rota of one week every month or two (depending on staffing levels), and on our on-call weeks we had to actively watch our network's monitoring system and respond immediately to all alerts (of which there were at least a dozen a day, sometimes many more) from 8AM till midnight all seven days of that week. We were also effectively on-call 24/7/365 for emergencies in our respective roles, and regularly required to work overnights and weekends for after-hours deployments and changes; usually every other week I'd be working several hours on the weekend, on average. This after-hours work was in addition to our normal ~9AM-6PM work schedules. For this, we were paid absolutely nothing extra nor given any time in lieu regardless of the circumstances (though our direct manager was decent and would look the other way if we came in at, say, 11AM instead of 9AM after we'd been working straight through until 5AM the night before...). We were also supposed to be on-call during our very generous two weeks of annual leave per year, but I flat refused to answer my phone while I was on vacation. Our average working hours (and certainly the annual leave) would have been straight-up illegal here, of course, but it was in the US, so pretty much anything goes there.

LegacyUser

Borzoi wrote: »

In a different sectorbut the principle is the same.

On call standby is about 20% of a typical weeks wage.
Call out is x1.5 or x2 depending on time of day or weekend with minimum 2 hour payment. Hours worked on call can't be allowed to interfere with regular weeks payment, ie if you've been on site all night and can't start the following day at your regular 9am, you still get paid as if you did.

The allowance can vary between companies, if getting called out is rare, the allowance should be more, as you're not getting the OT payments but still putting life on hold.

Your on call/standby, is that 24 hours or just until midnight?

I forgot to add that all of the numbers quoted above are before tax so the payment into my hand is significantly lower.

We would probably get a ticket 50% of the time you're on standby and then there's a 50% chance we would have to travel and act on that ticket. different customers would have different SLA's, 2 hours would be the tightest one really

Borzoi

StandbyRates wrote: »

Your on call/standby, is that 24 hours or just until midnight?

From 5pm untill 8am the following morning and all day Saturday and Sunday. Typically on call is one week in 6. More often than that can be hard to sustain

sweetie

On call in the PS. Feck all really, less than 4k for one week in 5, including having to do 5 days over xmas holidays. Less than 4k a year gross and no payment for time spent on calls or travelling. Only time in lieu for time onsite.