COLUMN ONE : The High Price of Overtime : America has a love-hate relationship with extra hours. The pay’s good, but it costs workers plenty.

Facing furious deadlines, Margaret Nix worked 34 out of every 35 days on the Boeing Co.’s aircraft assembly line. Mandatory overtime, 12-hour days. She gained a pile of money. She lost a disgruntled husband. Then her teen-age daughter suffered an unrelated psychological breakdown.

One day Nix, who asked that her real name not be used, tried to coax the withdrawn girl to recall some of the family’s good times.

“Mom,” her daughter said, “you were never home.”

Such stories, drenched in guilt and anger, contributed to a 48-day strike last fall by 57,000 Boeing machinists. Some of the strikers carried picket signs demanding stricter limits on overtime with slogans such as, “Do your children know what you look like?”

Life at Boeing--where the company now promises to limit overtime to a mere 144 hours every three months--is an extreme example of the pressure overtime work can generate. Yet late in the afternoon each day in many offices and factories, the same kind of tension gurgles in the stomachs of hundreds of thousands of employees who pray that they won’t be asked or ordered to work overtime--and those who are equally hopeful that they will.

America’s work force has a love-hate relationship with overtime. On one side are people desperate for more money. On the other are people desperate for more personal time.

For every Margaret Nix at Boeing there is a co-worker like Charles Anderson, a generation younger, who came to the Everett plant last year badly in debt and volunteered to work far beyond maximum mandatory overtime to pull his bank balance up. Figure it. If you work 20 hours a week overtime on a $14-an-hour machinist job--and Anderson has worked as many as 40 extra hours some weeks--your pay shoots from $560 to $980.

Some Boeing workers are relieved that the company is cutting back on OT in the wake of the strike. But Anderson, who is married and the father of a 2-year-old daughter he barely knew until the strike, is going crazy. He was planning on buying a house this spring. Now he’s uncertain if he’ll make enough money to do it.

More than 10 million Americans who work for hourly wages supplement their paychecks by $40 billion to $50 billion a year by working an average of nine extra hours a week at time-and-a-half. The money pays for things as discretionary as vacations and as crucial as mortgages and cars.

Overtime can mean limitless potential for some workers, such as the Los Angeles County fireman who worked so many consecutive 24-hour shifts a few years ago that he made $98,000--more than the county fire chief. It can mean countless headaches for others, such as the working mothers who make frantic telephone calls to day-care centers to say they’ll be late. It generates arguments with supervisors over uncomfortable questions--who should get first dibs on OT, who should volunteer, or who should be volunteered on days when nobody wants to work the extra hours.

Overtime is the grease that allows many companies to pare their work forces in this era of so-called “lean-and-mean” business. It is the friction that drives many of today’s demands for flexible schedules and child-care facilities at businesses for the convenience of working parents.

Mandatory overtime, particularly when assigned with little notice, “is one of the last holdouts” in the debate over balancing work and family concerns, said Dr. Susan Ginsberg, editor of a work and family life newspaper at Bank Street College in New York.

“Flex time, child care, changing maternity benefits--they’re all being discussed, but there’s not much awareness of the overtime issue” as the cause of personal chaos, Ginsberg said.

All told, 34 million people--nearly one-third of the nation’s work force--work more than 40 hours a week. Most do not get paid for their extra hours because they are either self-employed or are salaried supervisors or “professionals” exempt from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires time-and-a-half for work beyond eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.

Comp Time

Some uncompensated overtime workers take off extra days or weeks of “comp time” each year. However, three-quarters of the nation’s employers do not permit comp time, according to preliminary results of a survey of 197 companies by the Bureau of National Affairs Inc.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has not separately surveyed paid overtime workers since 1985. Its current surveys, which lump together those who labor with and without overtime pay, show that 12.6 million Americans work 49 to 59 hours a week and another 9.3 million work 60 or more hours.

These numbers are climbing twice as fast as the size of the work force.

While the total number of employed persons rose 19% in the past decade, the number working 49 to 59 hours rose 46%. The number working 60 or more hours rose 38%.

These increases have contributed to today’s portrait of a sometimes strained American family life.

Median weekly hours worked by Americans increased 20% between 1973 and 1985, from 40.6 a week to 48.8, while the leisure time plummeted 32%, from 26.2 hours to 17.7 hours, according to polls taken by Louis Harris & Associates.

Americans are working harder because earnings by hourly workers have lagged 15% behind consumer price increases since the late 1970s, labor economists say. Not only does the number of two-income households continue to rise, but more than 7 million people now work two jobs--the highest level in more than 30 years.

The notion that there may be something fundamentally harmful about longer working hours is scarcely audible. Yet it was not always this way.

One of the earliest contributions of the American organized labor movement since its inception in the early 19th Century was to lobby for reduced working hours. In the early 20th Century, with the average workweek still above 50 hours, there was considerable Utopian debate about how leisure--not work--might one day become man’s prime concern as technology freed him from long, backbreaking days.

During the Depression, the notion of shorter hours gained political support as a way to spread a severely limited number of jobs. Legislation to create a 30-hour workweek passed the U.S. Senate in the early 1930s and appeared to have strong momentum. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually refused to support it, countering with a series of public works programs to create more jobs.

Course Is Set

It was this change of philosophy--trading shorter hours for the right to work--that set the nation on its present course, said Benjamin K. Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa who wrote “Work Without End.” Most Americans have now come to define themselves by their jobs, not their beliefs, and shorter hours are regarded as a negative economic indicator, he said.

Most West European nations, by contrast, have significantly shortened work hours since World War II. The European workweek is now generally shorter than the American week, and vacations are significantly longer. Many European countries have national limits on overtime.

In this country, the overtime premium created by the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, was intended as a penalty to coerce employers into hiring more people rather than using longer shifts. But it lost most of its force long ago.

Because of the soaring costs of company-paid health insurance and other benefits, which now make up 25% to 35% of the cost of compensation, employers find it far cheaper to scale back the number of permanent employees and get the job done by paying overtime.

For example, while the manufacturing sector of the economy saw significant layoffs during the 1980s, the average weekly overtime of individual manufacturing workers increased 40% from 1980 to 1988.

Dan Trammell, a Los Angeles attorney who represents mostly salaried employees in worker’s compensation cases, says he sees an increasing number of cases in which excessive hours contribute to health problems.

“Employers are shrinking their staffs, and when they do that they cut muscle, bone and everything else as well as fat, and those who are left are absolutely going over the edge . . . they feel overwhelmed,” he said.

John Zalusky, an AFL-CIO economist, said that in order to force employers to use more hourly workers instead of relying on overtime, the labor standards act would have to be amended to require triple pay for overtime.

Delegates to the AFL-CIO’s biannual constitutional convention last fall advocated such a change, but the issue is not a high priority to organized labor because a significant number of its members, particularly younger workers, want all the overtime they can get.

“What’s difficult for organized labor is that they have two constituencies,” said Richard Belous, an economist with the National Planning Assn. who specializes in work-related issues.

With many workers feeling stretched by low wage growth and insecure about the future because of corporate restructuring that has laid off millions of employees, the idea of limiting overtime sounds quixotic or plain threatening.

There was no better illustration of this addiction to overtime than what happened a couple months ago in a Chrysler mini-van plant in St. Louis.

Chrysler wanted to cut a deal with Local 110 of the United Auto Workers. It wanted to change the plant, where workers average 54 hours a week, to a four-day week with a standard 10-hour shift. Chrysler would boost production by 20%, absorbing 1,000 to 1,300 workers who were about to be laid off at a nearby plant.

Workers Say No

The proposal sounded attractive, for it would preserve jobs in a beleaguered industry. However, Local 110’s rank-and-file objected because they would no longer receive overtime for working 10-hour days. In addition, Chrysler wanted to cut Saturday overtime from time-and-a-half to time-and-a-quarter.

The union, whose approval was needed to modify an existing contract, voted 2,340 to 300 against the expansion plan, triggering an onslaught of publicity branding them as selfish.

“They wanted us to work the same amount of hours for less pay,” said Charlie Sides, the local’s recording secretary. “You need the money because you never know when it’s (the plant) going to shut down again.”

When the International Assn. of Machinists’ contract with Boeing expired last fall, the aerospace company offered to drop its maximum overtime limit of 200 hours per quarter--about 15 hours a week--to 160. But because the union wanted a larger hourly wage increase and less mandatory OT, a strike was called.

In settling the strike, Boeing resisted demands for further hourly wage increases, but increased the size of year-end bonuses. In addition to cutting mandatory overtime to 144 hours per quarter, it cut mandatory weekend overtime from three consecutive weekends to two and said that working either a Saturday or Sunday--not both days, as before--would constitute overtime weekend work. In addition, for the first time, all overtime work over 160 hours per quarter will earn double time.

For all the value an employer can squeeze out of a work force by using overtime, smart bosses recognize the hazards of burn-out that come with too much mandatory OT, said Norman Handshear, an aerospace executive who is president of the American Compensation Assn.

Conrad J. Conway, administrative manager of GE Plastics in Oxnard, confronts this choice often. Conway runs a 24-hour factory and spends 8% to 10% of his payroll on overtime, but has chosen on occasion to shut down some of his machinery when he can’t find enough volunteers to work overtime.

“We don’t have mandatory overtime here,” he said. “We do at times talk to people about the need to share the overtime burden, ask non-participants to pick up some, but I don’t think there’s any merit in mandatory overtime. It spreads out the effort but it probably leads to hard feelings.”

The effort was spread as broadly as possible--and with considerable hard feelings--at Vons market distribution center in El Monte last year.

Vons spent much of 1989 trying to integrate its stores with the newly acquired Safeway chain, an effort that put particular pressures on the distribution center’s warehouses. Mandatory overtime resulted in months of 12-hour to 16-hour days for many of the 250 warehouse workers.

“I had nine, maybe a dozen wives call me during that time to chew my butt off about how much the guys were working,” said Tony Perez, a business agent for the United Food and Commercial Workers local that represents the workers.

Because the union contract calls for double-time pay after 10 hours, warehouse workers, who make between $5 and $13 an hour, saw huge checks.

Gary Anderson, a 25-year employee from Rialto, paid off all his bills and bought a new Thunderbird, but there is no sparkle in his eye when he talks about it.

For five months, Anderson said, his wife moved out of the house because she couldn’t put up with his constant irritability, due mostly to a lack of sleep.

“I was working 36 to 45 hours OT a week but the money didn’t mean too much to me,” Anderson said. “Sometimes there wouldn’t be eight hours between going home and coming back. I’d be sleeping four, five hours a day. A lot of times I’d doze off driving home.”

Desperate, the union had its attorney send Vons a letter warning that unless overtime was reduced, Vons could be legally liable for any traffic accidents its workers were involved in when they commuted.

After six months, the worst of the overtime ended as the Safeway acquisition work smoothed out.

A week ago something strange happened to Anderson.

“I saw my first eight-hour day in I don’t know how long,” he said. “I snuck out the (warehouse) door.”

His wife, who had moved back, was shocked.

“She said she thought someone was trying to break into the house,” Anderson said.

WHO GETS OVERTIME

Chart shows percentage of U.S. companies that pay these selected categories of workers for overtime work.

CATEGORY PERCENTAGE Office/clerical 98 Production/service 96 Professional/technical 57 First-level supervisors 50 Sales 29 Middle management 22

WHAT OVERTIME PAYS

Chart shows what kind of compensation companies pay for overtime.

COMPENSATION PERCENTAGE Straight time 28 Time-and-a-half 97 Double time 19 Straight compensatory time 16 Compensatory time at time-and-a-half 7 Other 6

NOTE: Percentage add up to more than 100% because many companies use more than one method.

SOURCE: Bureau of National Affairs Inc.