Teachers are perhaps the most abused segment of the labor sector, primarily because of the ill-defined boundary between work and not-work. (After all, if you are not able to check the papers for Monday, you can bring it home and check it. Consider the embalmer bringing home work.)

To make sure that you are working only what you are supposed to work for, make sure that you have a clear job description. But even if you don't have a job description, make sure that you are only required to come to school for a maximum of 48 hours per week.

The Labor Code mandates that an employee shall only be made to work for eight hours or less per day for a maximum of six consecutive days (thus 8 x 6 = 48). If you are made to work for more than eight hours per day, then you must be paid overtime. Some schools utilize a shortened work week, so you might not need to report the whole day on Saturday or not report at all on Saturday, but you have longer days from Monday to Friday. In this case, you are not going to be paid overtime, because what you should have worked on during the Saturday was distributed across the week. (This arrangement is supposed to be approved by the Department of Labor and Employment and must be agreed upon by all workers in writing, but I know that this practice is not widely reported to the DOLE.)

Here's a way to compute how much time you are required to work:

1. Get the length of time from your required login time to your allowed logout time.
2. Subtract 1 from the time above if you are given a one-hour lunch break during which you are not under the beck and call of management (i.e. you can sleep, etc. - more below).
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the days of the week you are made to report.
4. Add everything up. If it goes beyond 48, then you are rendering overtime service and you must be paid. Inform your management.

Here's an example: Teacher X is required to report from 7:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. from Mondays to Fridays. He has a 15-minute break from 10:00 to 10:15 A.M. and a 35-minute lunch break from 12:25 to 1:00 P.M.

Here's the computation for our example:

1. From 7:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. is 9 hours and 30 minutes.
2. Since the lunch break is less than an hour we don't subtract 1 hour from the 9 hours and a half.
3. Mr. X is required to report from Monday to Friday, so that would be 9.5 x 5 = 47.5 hours, an hour less than the maximum 48 hours set by law. Mr. X does not need to be paid overtime.

Note the following:
1. The 15-minute break from 10:00-10:15 A.M. is considered worked time, because it is primarily for the benefit of the employer-school (after all, you don't want hungry teachers teaching your kids, right?).
2. The 35-minute lunch break is also considered worked time, since it is less than an hour. That's the rule. If it is less than an hour, it is always considered worked time.

Note also the effects of considering lunch time as worked hours: since it is worked hours, you cannot say no to your management asking you to help out in marshalling the canteen during this time.

But you should always have at least 25 minutes of lunch time, wherein you are allowed to eat your lunch in peace.

But if the same Mr. X is required to render a half-day on a Saturday, then that time is overtime work. If Mr. X is required to report from 8:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M. on Saturdays, he must be paid for the 3 1/2 hours of overtime every Saturday (it's only 3 1/2 because the employer still has the 1/2 hour from the 48 hours).

It is common, but I think the practice of asking the teachers to stay after office hours to attend to some school activity should also be considered overtime work hours.

Sir/Madam,
Can you give me some advise regarding this set-up wherein I spend the entire day from 7.00 am to 5.00 pm in school and spending 20 mins eating lunch and all other activities spent doing school related work like typing reports, checking papers, writing lesson plans and preparing visual aids, printing intervention materials, etc. Thats 50 hours for the entire week. I read something about a CSC memo explaining this overtime/ required number of hours a teacher is expected to render services in a day that after 1 hr and 15 mins spent on top of the 8 hours that 1 service credit must be given if the school cannot afford to pay the overtime through monetary means.