Should the US military financially compensate soldiers for working long hours during non-exercise, or non-deployed times
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So I have a friend whose in a crap unit, he works a ton of hours all the time and bitches because he feels like he's working a ton of hours because of poor leadership. Taskings coming down at the last minute, being told to sit around and wait, its very rare for him to get off before 8 or 9 PM and his unit is not deploying, getting ready for an exercise or anything.
And I've heard this compliant time and time again and I know the US Military has a huge retention issue. I've always felt one of the reasons for the retention is not the pay or job sanctification but the quality of life and if the US Military focused on quality of life improvements. such as not having soldiers put in 16-18 hour days when its totally not needed that more soldiers would stay in.
I think soldiers should be able to file for overtime compensation if they are ordered to stay past normal duty hours when they are in garrison and there is no exercise or up coming deployment.
I also understand and respect the fact there are going be times when you need to put in the hours such as during field execrises or when you are deployed or preparing for those events. And I think units should have the ability to say "Ok guys we are getting ready to head to the field, we are going need more man hours etc" and in those cases soldiers can't file for overtime pay.
I also feel like commanders should be judged on how much overtime was paid and they should have to justify that.
One commander that stood out to me, issued what she called the 17:00 policy. She said all normal duty service members needed to be out of their offices on their way home by 17:00 during normal days. It took a Major to keep someone till 18:00, it took a Lt. Col to keep soldiers past that time. And if that happened the Major/LT. Col would have to explain WHY they kept their soldiers longer.
Her justification and lots of people agreed with it, is a good leadership team should be able to take the man power they are given, and accomplish the work load they have. And if they find they can't, they need to either find a way to reduce the work load, or get more man power. She reasoning was moral is a critical aspect of maintaining good order and discipline, and requiring people to stay late because of some leader slacked off and forgot to tell his joes that they needed to do X or Y until 4 PM in the afternoon is a big hit on moral.
Thoughts?
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