Slightly indignant
Okay, so on the whole I'm quite happy with my working situation, but last week got me thinking about some stuff. Basically, when I work overtime, the first 10 hours a week count for nothing. After 10 hours, I get banked time, 1:1. This has been collectively agreed to by the office, or at least, has been agreed by the boss that it is collectively agreed. We don't work a ton of overtime so it isn't a big issue in the first place.
The reasoning behind the 10 hours is that we get an hour paid lunch every day, so really we only 'work' 35 hours a week. This I get... I don't mind working up to 5 hours a week extra to help out, because the company is new, and I like to get stuff done on time. The other 5 hours is more or less due to the fact that we get profit sharing, so we should have a keen interest in keeping the company going. (Let's forget for a moment that my contract simply says that overtime = banked time ).
I was giving this some thought after working 9.5 overtime hours last week, and wondered exactly how much impact my overtime really has on my profit sharing, which I am told is my compensation for that second 5 hours. For what I'm about to explain, we have to assume that all of the employees in my company contribute equally to productivity, and that hours worked is proportional to profit. This is far from exact, but I think it illustrates my point.
There are 5 people in my company working full time, so this is 800 hours a month. So, the 5 hours of overtime I contribute to increase profit is 0.625% of the total monthly hours.
Now, for a company our size, in our particular field, I will say that making $25,000 in a month is reasonable and close enough to show my point, but still imaginary enough to avoid giving away any real financial information about said company. Given that time spent = increase in profit, those 5 hours I put in equaled $156.25. Scaling my wage a bit to compensate for the imaginary profit number, this is only a bit more than double what 5 hours is worth to me.
Long story short, unless my profit sharing is more than 50%, then my compensation is pretty much negligible.