Eaton Corp. Imposes 60-Hour Workweek on Its Salaried Staff

Hughes Aircraft may have gained notoriety by its demand for unpaid overtime from its white-collar employees earlier this year, but it was Eaton Corp. that expanded the concept from dawn to dusk.

Eaton’s electronic instrumentation division in Marina del Rey recently told its professional and other fixed-salary employees that they will be working 60-hour, six-day weeks during December.

The company is more than a month behind schedule on some of its Pentagon contracts and is attempting to catch up during the holidays, according to an official at the Defense Contract Administration Service, a branch of the Defense Department.

But not all of the Eaton employees think that working 20 extra hours a week without pay is how they want to demonstrate the holiday spirit.

“This 20-hour overtime policy makes me feel really badly,” one Eaton engineer said. “It’s supposed to be the holidays, and people want to spend some time with their family and shopping for Christmas gifts.”

Another worker added that “I usually work overtime, but that’s voluntary. With all these extra hours without pay, some of the hourly people are making more money than I do.”

Executives at the division could not be reached for comment Thursday. A secretary to division Vice President Peter de Lellis said the entire executive staff had left for a meeting. “They may be here tomorrow, but I’m not sure. There are conflicting rumors,” she said.

An internal Eaton memo tells workers: “For the month of December, regular work schedules for manufacturing personnel will be 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., (10 hours) Monday through Saturday. This will be necessary to finish the year with a strong shipment month and to make a strong start for January-February-March shipments.”

The Eaton division does overhaul and service work for all three military services and holds contracts worth $2.9 million, according to the Defense Contract Administration Service. The firm also makes frequency synthesizers, which are used to test military electronics gear.

Earlier this year, Hughes Aircraft announced to its employees that they were expected to work five hours of unpaid overtime a week.

That policy evoked such an outpouring of indignation that the company quickly canceled it. Many Hughes engineers and other white-collar workers said they were professionally insulted by the policy because they were already working far more than five hours a week of unpaid overtime.

“Nobody is fighting it here,” the Eaton engineer said. “We are just afraid to lose our jobs. People get fired here at the drop of a hat.”