How could they be building a case to terminate me for working... too much? It makes sense to me if their case is that I’m standing around on the floor burning hours & accomplishing nothing, but can they actually terminate me for having done extra work every day?

I also think I might have mischaracterized or exaggerated my situation—I’m not ever doing any extra work that wasn’t at all pre-approved by a lead. So it’s not like I’m doing someone’s entire push for the next day and then they have nothing to do when they come in. It’s more like the opening lead tells me I can take a meal 5.5hrs in (instead of just leaving) because he knows there’ll be two full uboats in another department for me to push after—I think it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be staying late a significant amount of time to finish up the push that he asked me to? And then he tells me informally to come in for an 8 hour shift on my day off, if I’m willing to. Are those extra hours fairly taken on my part, or should I exercise stricter discretion when coming in on days I wasn’t scheduled?

I’ll admit there was some indulgent satisfaction in being able to work (and earn!) a bit more. But I also took pride in the fact that I was willing to regularly stay on later than scheduled and work multiple departments in one day to make up the difference in areas that needed it. I’ve been working hard and was hoping this is something that would be viewed as taking initiative. Like, “Oh wow, he’s been staying as much as he can and doing whatever we need to get done.”

Another question—yesterday was a holiday and a TL was communicating to everyone that they should work as long as they wanted. As in, he genuinely told me to stay as late as I was willing to, and warned me what time I would hit my 12hr compliance for a second meal period. Is this something that could also impact payroll negatively? In this case I picked up a bunch of hours but it was at the direct instruction of one TL. I know there’s a looser hour cap for holiday weeks, but does this mean that you can effectively go crazy without impacting payroll??