<prompt> Human: TL;DR: Despite being unionized, my office doesnt fight for overtime hour pay. Being a new employee, Im wondering if I should challenge this, and how.Throw away for obvious reasons.I imagine this happens more often than many of us would like to admit: Employees work overtime hours, they request overtime pay, and they are denied for whatever reason. This becomes an office norm, whereas some employees occasionally work the additional hours because they have a job to do, but they do not report overtime hours. In some situations, upper management may barter offering compensation time-off which in effect doesnt help because when you do take a day off, your work just piles up till the next day and you work twice as hard. Any person who questions overtime hours is often times essentially strong armed by upper management, or is too meek to speak up for themselves. Soon, everyone becomes complacent and settles, agreeing that This is the way things are and there is nothing I can do about it. Now, no one gets over time.I work at a State University. I just picked this job up 3 months. Walking in the door, I expecting to be compensated for the overtime hours I worked, as any employee would be. After asking my coworkers if they ever work overtime, I continue to get the response No, our office doesnt do overtime. There is a select few at the very top of the School I work in For example there is a business school, pharmacy school, sciences school, etc, within the College I work for University of ___, who essentially dictate the schools not universities policy on overtime. Think of it as the head of the department, but not a company president. In other words, the department headmy bosss, bosss, boss says We dont pay overtime.Now here is the thing, I just got hired. I expect to be paid overtime for overtime hours I work. The real kicker is because I am a state employee we have a union behind us. My entire office has a union behind it, yet everyone here has grown so complacent that they dont even write in their overtime hours, and consistently put in their regular time hours onto their timecards week after week. Ive spoke with a few people in my office, and this generally seems to be something they would like to change, and have even encouraged me as the new guy to challenge. Of course, I would love to challenge this especially with the backing of my coworkers. The tricky thing is this is going put a huge thorn in my bosss paw who is also in the same union. She is going to have to go to her boss who is also in our union, and then go to the person who is in charge. Im struggling to determine if I really want to cause a stink.What do I do, how do I challenge this without risking my job and causing a fiasco?Assistant: Are you hourly or salary? Human: We are Salary, we are to work a set amount of hours each week.  <response>: Check in your local municipality, but IIRC my state in the US does not provide for overtime in the case of salaried employees. The expected amount you work is an issue between you and your employer. In the US, individual states have Bureaus or Departments of Labor with 800 numbers. That or some research on their site should clear this up. 