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MT Week / Tuesday / Take A Union Break - Bettie_Bgood

Posted: May 16, 2011

Suggested Activity: Keep Track of Your Donations I've heard time and again the complaint that MTs are expected to do work for which they are NOT being compensated. Well, there's a name for that â�� it's called "a donation." Starting today, keep track of the donations you make as an MT to your company â�� you can even print up a form, so you can keep track for an entire month â�� is it the header you don't get paid for? What exactly are the items in the header you spend time on? Reading emails? Etc. How much does this all add up to, in a month's time? And BTW, how much is NJA costing you? You might want to rent the movie "Office Space" â�� in which coworkers come up with a scheme to steal "percentages of pennies," and get rich in the process. When you think of the "percents of pennies" you're not being paid, in conjunction with the wonderful pay of MTSO CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etcâ�¦kind of makes you wonder if maybe a class action lawsuit is the answer, to get our "percents of pennies back." At least, Bettie Bgood has gotta wonder, this MT Week.

Exactly - mtmom

[ In Reply To ..]
Someone posted earlier that Sue of Transcend makes all this money, but she works really hard answering emails and all that kind of stuff. I believe she does work hard, but she also gets compensated that as part of her salary. We, however, are expected to read and send email, look up patient information, attend meetings, etc, and we do not get paid for that time. From what I understand looking up labor law, even as a production employee, anything work-related that we do is to be compensated by the employee. I've been toying with the idea of having an attorney look into this. Maybe I should just call the Dept. of Labor and find out if it is legal or not.

Excellent idea! - Do the math

[ In Reply To ..]
Speaking of NJA, let's look at what happens when we wait 15 minutes when we run out of work before signing off:

At 15 minutes per day, 5 days a week:

15 minutes per day = 1 hour, 15 minutes per week

2 weeks = 2-1/2 hours

1 month = 5 hours

Multiply that times 12 months, and that is 60 hours per year. I know I have not been compensated for all of this time. I run out of work virtually every day. I'm also certain there are many more where I came from.

So that's 60 hours per year spent sitting on the clock for no pay.

I'd say that's quite a donation.

My company came up with a conniving little way - to steal part of our pay. (sm)

[ In Reply To ..]
They rigged up a new system where we have to type all paragraph titles (HPI, DX, ROS, etc) into a field other than the body of the report. It rips us off in two ways: 1- We aren't paid for them, and, 2- they take twice as long to insert as they would have otherwise. There are other ways we're being cheated as well, but that's the latest example.

Ugh, glad my company doesn't do that - mt

[ In Reply To ..]
Transcend doesn't do that. I was amazed to find out they pay us for inserts that are already made. Unfortunately, I don't do reports with the inserts anymore. That sure was a nice bump in lines while it lasted. :)

Response - SS

[ In Reply To ..]
If you are, indeed, being "cheated" out of income, the IRS is being "cheated" out of taxes on that income.

This is a jestful commentary.

Perhaps you should put a Post-It on your IRS tax form:

Dear IRS: Please forgive me for not paying the taxes you are owed; however, I was not fully compensated for all the labor that I performed.

Good idea - notmycupoftea

[ In Reply To ..]
The MTSO that is charging my old hosp acct $2.00 per report also said it wouldn't be a problem for the MTs to take care of "forms". These are OB, cardiac, blood volumes and various reports that have the technician's handwritten form scanned into PACS. We have to go into PACS to retrieve those and go back into Meditech to download the same form that we can type the values into and then transcribe a dictated report. PACS is super slow, as is Meditech when it loads up so we have to wait for the forms to download a long time. This is for a company that just cut out an incentive tier AND cut the rate on this particular one account. MTSO sees no problem with this. Last week, I had one of these forms which took 30 minutes to complete thanks to the tech not scanning in the form right away, and PACS and Meditech issues. I made $1.70 for the total hour.

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