OT Fattening Paychecks, but Stretching Workers Thin

BALTIMORE — FMC Corp.’s farm-chemical business is humming. The result is that Allen Bailey worked all but four days between November and June--including weekends, including Christmas, including the first anniversary of his wedding to Sharon Bailey.

Sixty-hour, seven-day workweeks are standard for the chemical technician. At least twice a month he works 16 hours straight. After pulling an overnight shift, he’s lucky to return to his Mount Winans townhouse in time to kiss his wife goodbye before she leaves for work.

“Sometimes I tell him it feels real funny being married to someone and yet still feel so lonely--like you’re not really together,” said Sharon, a budget analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County.

Across the United States, manufacturers are working their people harder than they have since the early part of this century. A thriving economy, a dearth of skilled labor and the high cost of hiring have driven factories to pile on the overtime.

“This is the kind of thing you see after six years of uninterrupted growth,” said Andrew Paparozzi, chief economist for the National Assn. of Printers and Lithographers and a close observer of labor markets. “We’ve had this tremendous burst of activity in the last six months, and the only way we could meet it is with expanded overtime.”

Average overtime for U.S. factory workers reached 4.9 hours a week in April--up from 3.3 hours six years ago and the highest ever measured by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And that’s just the average. Tales of 70-hour weeks and overtime-fat paychecks are common; Herculean 100-hour stints aren’t unheard of.

“There are an awful lot of upfront costs just to put a guy on the payroll,” said Alex Doyle, president of Micro-Machining Inc., a Baltimore shop where workers have been averaging between 48 and 55 hours a week lately. “It’s gotten to the point where it makes sense to increase overtime for a guy already on the payroll rather than incurring the cost of hiring an employee.”

But now employees are starting to complain--big paychecks notwithstanding--adding to the national debate on quality of life, the workplace and compensatory time off.

About 185 workers at FMC’s Baltimore plant walked off the job this month after the company refused to limit the workweek to 68 hours and to give workers 16 hours off after they have worked three consecutive 16-hour shifts.

The dispute came after several recent strikes having to do with overtime at U.S. automobile plants, including the troubles at General Motors factories this year.

“There’s no such thing in my household as quality time,” said Allen, who has two daughters, 8 and 18 years old. “My wife says, ‘You pay more attention to FMC than you do to me and the family.’ ”

Driven by robust world demand for FMC’s herbicides and pesticides, several of the company’s Baltimore lines work seven days a week, all day, all night. Many workers pull a 16-hour double shift at least twice a month when they switch from nights to days, days to evenings or evenings to nights. Two or three 16-hour shifts in a row--with eight hours off in between--are common, payroll records supplied by the union show.

They are entirely legal.

What’s to prevent an employer from assigning a 100-hour workweek and firing anybody who can’t handle it?

“Nothing,” said Ronald Ehrenberg, labor economist at Cornell University in New York. “The only limit for most jobs is, after 40 hours a week, you must pay time-and-a-half,” or 150% of the employee’s basic hourly wage.

Americans are no strangers to longer, tougher workweeks this decade, as chronicled by Harvard Professor Juliet Schor in “The Overworked American.”

But grueling work schedules have become especially apparent in factories, where on-the-spot attendance is required every minute in a shift. And unlike white-collar workweeks, manufacturing hours are precisely measured by the government.

Employers are relying more on existing workers to meet the demand, and less on new ones, than they did in previous expansions. The trend has hurt the pace of factory job creation nationwide, economists said.

The reason: Managers know they’ll get full value for every extra hour worked by an experienced hand. New hires are more of a gamble, especially in high-skill jobs, and they come with big up-front costs.

Benefits now account for roughly a third of an employee’s base pay now. That’s still less than the 50% overtime premium, but employers these days also must foot big training costs for new people, and inexperienced employees are more likely to get hurt, pushing up workers’ compensation expenses.

“It’s expensive to pay overtime, but the fact is, it’s more productive because you have the people with the skills in position to meet the demand,” Paparozzi said.

For highly paid workers, company and Social Security costs stop when annual pay reaches about $63,000. That also makes overtime more attractive, Cornell’s Ehrenberg added.

And if business slows down, it’s easier to cut overtime hours than to lay off people.

“Growth is continuing at a moderate pace, but businesses are loath to hire because they think it can’t possibly last,” said Richard Clinch, program director for the Maryland Business Research Partnership at the University of Baltimore.

There’s also a scarcity of skilled labor.

With a national unemployment rate of 4.8% in May, a 23-year low, “there are absolute shortages in certain areas” of high-skill factory workers, said Michael Galiazzo, director of the Regional Manufacturing Institute, a Baltimore-area trade group.

The time crunch has set off a dispute in Congress, where Republicans and Democrats both say they favor letting employees choose compensatory time off instead of overtime pay. A comp-time bill has passed the House of Representatives. But Senate Democrats have blocked a similar measure, saying it would offer inadequate protection against employer discrimination against workers who prefer overtime pay.

Even a mandated comp-time option, however, might not bring relief to workers like those at FMC, Ehrenberg said.

“If we have these long hours consistently, the workers aren’t going to be able to take any comp time,” he said, and the congressional proposal wouldn’t give workers more leeway to refuse overtime assignments.

At the Baltimore FMC plant, workers are counting on contract negotiations, not legislation, to bring relief.