> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation.
If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. If you knew about that going in then you weighed it against the offered salary and decided it was worth it. It's not "unpaid on-call" in that case, it's paid on-call.
Obviously it can also be done poorly in ways that are harmful and dishonest. Not communicating it clearly during the job interview and salary negotiation, applying it inconsistently, or changing the frequency or the difficulty of the rotation after you have started are all real problems.
For me personally, there's no possible way that a company can correctly factor on-call costs into my salary, because the on-call costs are based on what I am doing at the time.
You'd have to pay me a biblically large multiplier on my base salary to get me to pick work over my kids or wife. My kids aren't going to remember that I made a few thousand bucks by ducking out halfway through an important-to-them event. My wife is sure as shit ain't going to forgive me _or you_ if you call me into work in the middle of some adult time. And the cost for you to make sure that I'm not participating in such activities and am available to work on very short notice is...well, it's the exact same number as if you had interrupted such activities.
If you really need the coverage in the middle of the night, hire more engineers whose normal 8-ish hour shifts are during the night? Can't afford to? Perhaps you're not so good at business then. Better yet, stop building a fucking house of cards that can topple your company if it wobbles a little bit. If your systems going down for a few hours can take down your company, outside of some exceptional circumstances, that's a failure on your part.
>> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation.
> If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations.
Where this logic breaks down is when on-call expectations are in addition to what a salaried position compensates - a 40-ish hour work week.
Expecting an employee to be paid industry rate for services rendered and then expecting periodic 24-168 hour near real-time availability without compensation is, by definition, "unpaid on-call".
And the frequency with which you have to take one of the 168-hour shifts is inversely proportional to how many colleagues you have in the rotation. if somebody leaves, the amount of unpaid work you have to do increases.
So if on-call isn’t explicitly compensated, an employee quitting essentially gives the rest of the team more hours at a lower hourly rate.
If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. If you knew about that going in then you weighed it against the offered salary and decided it was worth it. It's not "unpaid on-call" in that case, it's paid on-call.
Obviously it can also be done poorly in ways that are harmful and dishonest. Not communicating it clearly during the job interview and salary negotiation, applying it inconsistently, or changing the frequency or the difficulty of the rotation after you have started are all real problems.