Employment law - Enforced overtime

[MondyJim]

Hi, hopefully someone with some experience in HR or employment law may be able to offer some advice.

I'll try to keep this brief but basically our company was bought out about 18 months ago and we have been going through a lot of changes during integration. We went live with a new accounts system on April 1 and the implementation was very poorly managed and the result is we have a massive backlog because orders are not flowing through the system.

A couple of weeks back our MD told us that we all MUST work 4 hours extra per week, either 1 hour before/after normal hours or all 4 on a Saturday morning. No flexibility in shortening lunch breaks or half hour before and after normal hours. Management don't seem to know which department is the bottleneck and as such can't give us any specific extra tasks to enable us to actively improve the situation, so we are just sat here doing more of our normal work.

So, after that waffle, my question is: is it legal to have a set amount of overtime forced on to us with no extra pay and with no end date set? Our contracts say that our normal hours are x-y Monday to Friday but that we are expected to do a reasonable amount of extra work as our workload a requires. In my opinion this goes above and beyond that.

Thanks

[elster]

MondyJim said:

Hi, hopefully someone with some experience in HR or employment law may be able to offer some advice.

I'll try to keep this brief but basically our company was bought out about 18 months ago and we have been going through a lot of changes during integration. We went live with a new accounts system on April 1 and the implementation was very poorly managed and the result is we have a massive backlog because orders are not flowing through the system.

A couple of weeks back our MD told us that we all MUST work 4 hours extra per week, either 1 hour before/after normal hours or all 4 on a Saturday morning. No flexibility in shortening lunch breaks or half hour before and after normal hours. Management don't seem to know which department is the bottleneck and as such can't give us any specific extra tasks to enable us to actively improve the situation, so we are just sat here doing more of our normal work.

So, after that waffle, my question is: is it legal to have a set amount of overtime forced on to us with no extra pay and with no end date set? Our contracts say that our normal hours are x-y Monday to Friday but that we are expected to do a reasonable amount of extra work as our workload a requires. In my opinion this goes above and beyond that.

Thanks

I thought both parties had to agree to compulsory overtime.

I'm not an expert though.