It is distressing, though not all that surprising, that your union contract offers no protection against all this overtime. Twenty years ago, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union, one of this country's most powerful industrial unions, gave up its resistance to mandatory overtime, supposedly to help out Chrysler when it was in economic difficulty. In short order, this temporary concession became the standard, and all three major auto companies began enjoying the right to schedule overtime as they saw fit. This development has spread throughout the unionized sector of the economy.

The situation has gotten even more complicated, as I suspect you know all too well. While wages and benefits lagged in the 1980s and 1990s, workers turned to overtime in order to maintain their living standards. Some of our brothers and sisters have gotten "addicted" to overtime. It has not been easy to develop a consensus in the ranks about what to do.