That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.
I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom.
Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee).
A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.
There’s a relevant quote attributed to Bob Carter:
> Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine
Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now, stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision.
I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal detriment and uploaded the result. About a week later, they could see the file had never been downloaded. Turns out the matter wasn’t that urgent and the client had other priorities. My friend was understandably upset, but it was a valuable lesson.
The advantage of framing it in monetary terms is that clients are very used to thinking in monetary terms. It's not a "no, we won't do that", but a "yes with a cost" that they'll very likely reject on their own terms. And it clearly leaves the door open for something that is really really urgent - be it a genuine emergency or just the result of poor planning.
It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality.
Margins are ample to cover low wages.
That's true, but that's always true - people with less bargaining power will always have a harder time. Nurses (and other care workers) also suffer from the effect that the people that suffer most from a hard stance on work time are their wards and not their bosses.
