Call-Outs

Tamsin tells the story of a friend who was having a problem with her toilet. She tried everything before giving up and calling a plumber.

The plumber arrived, turned a screw a quarter-turn and viola -- problem solved. The plumber looked at his watch and said, "You have 57 minutes left on the minimum one hour call-out. Is there anything else I can do?"

What followed were a series of tasks based on an equal number of plumbing problems that conspired to make Tamsin's friend's life less than it could be. The plumber fixed all of them, not in one hour but in two. 

"Where did the time go!" said Tamsin's friend after the plumber once again looked at his watch.

"Into my wallet," he deadpanned, before busting out in laughter.

They agreed to split the difference, but when the plumber wrote out the invoice, it showed only one hour, not two. "For the coffee," he smiled. "And the conversation."

Before labour unions (and indeed after them), when workers were at the beck and call of their employers, a worker could be called-out in the middle of the night for a three minute repair job and be paid only for those minutes. One of the great achievements of a labour union is that workers who show up for work can expect to be paid not only an hourly minimum, but a daily minimum.

When I was a cannery worker on the Skeena River,  the United Fisherman and Allied Workers Union saw to it that my work day amounted to a minimum of four hours pay, regardless of whether I worked three minutes or 240 minutes. The same applied to those middle of the night knocks on the bunkhouse door when someone had to take those twenty +30 red springs off the deck of a southbound packer.

Yesterday, while chancing on 221A's website, I noticed a job posting for an On Call/Part Time Technician. The position offers an above-minimum hourly living wage ($25-$32) and a retainer based on a minimum 30-60 hours a month work. What isn't clear in this posting is how call-outs are dealt with. For example, if, in the fourth week, after the technician has surpassed the monthly minimum 60 hours and indeed the 15 hours of that week (as covered by the retainer), the technician is called in for a one hour repair job, is the technician paid only for that hour, or is there, like there is with Tamsin's friend's plummer, a minimum call-out charge?