'I got to enjoy a comfortable 40-hour week': Tyranical manager bans overtime "without approval," overworked employees gladly comply

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Feb 28, 2023 9:00 AM EST

There's this thing that occasionally happens in workplaces, universally, across every industry, when management takes a look at their books and realizes how much they're paying workers in overtime. Commence initiative: Overtime approval—requiring workers to endure ridiculous approval processes to beat them into submission until they don't bother reporting overtime that they're working. The extra work still gets done, and costs don't increase. Job done.

The perplexingly confounding thing about organizations that go this route is that they almost always have a culture of forcing workers to work overtime to cover for chronic understaffing, dodging the pesky costs associated with having more workers on the payroll in the first place. That's all fine and dandy, but there's a reason these organizations suffer high rates of burnout and high turnover.

However, depending on how fed up your workers are with this transparent circus you're running, there's another way that this can go: They stop working overtime. Now you're stuck in a game of cat and mouse where your workers are technically doing exactly what you asked, but projects are falling by the wayside.

That's pretty much what we have in this workplace story of malicious compliance. Keep reading for the thread, as it was posted by Redditor u/_dontseeme. For more, check out these workers who quit when their manager tried to write them up after they helped close by working a double shift.