If you have an employee who can do their job without having to pay them overtime, wouldn't you want them to do that? Not if you're a bad manager. When one skilled Texas call center worker was told that he would have to start working mandatory overtime like everybody else, he also realized that for him, it only meant more money. 

As the call center's most skilled employee, he regularly racked up dozens more tickets completed than all of his other co-workers. "I was averaging 120-150 tickets a day," he wrote, "whereas some other employees might only average 60 or 70." However, according to him, those numbers did not exempt him from working mandatory overtime, even when he was easily able to complete the extra work given to him for overtime during the standard work day.

"The expectation is that you'll stay late like everybody else," his boss told him. So, he soon realized that if he had to stay late, he might as well get paid to do exactly the same thing at work that he would be doing at home: nothing. What were they going to do? He was still the highest performer by some margin. Of course even he acknowledged that lowering his output to 60-70 tickets like everybody else would have been the best way to handle his bad boss.