As an organizer for the United Auto Workers, a Manhattan resident, Deborah Schutt, spent hours in the lobbies of New York University buildings to track down adjunct professors and recruit them for the union.

“We had to be in the school constantly, all day long, sometimes 9 in the morning to 10 or 11 o’clock at night and then go back into the office to do paperwork,” she said. “I had zero quality of life.”

Ms. Schutt, 40, is one of three former organizers for the UAW to file complaints against the union with the federal Department of Labor, which is investigating the union’s practice of not compensating organizers for working overtime.

Julie Kushner, director of the union’s sub-regional office on University Place, said organizers perform “pretty high-level work.”

“It’s quite a professional job,” he said.

Ms. Schutt said she sometimes worked 80 hours a week as an organizer, collecting signatures from adjuncts at NYU and the New School between July 2002 and August 2003. She and the other former organizers say the union overworked them and repeatedly refused their requests for bonus pay for the overtime hours.

“We were totally committed, but can’t expect people to work like that for a year,” she said.

An official of the Department of Labor declined to comment on the case, because it is pending.

The dispute between the union and its organizers – which was first reported by the Washington Square News, a student newspaper – hinges on whether the organizers are entitled to overtime pay under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which also covers laws governing the minimum wage and child labor.

Officials of the union argue that the organizers are well-compensated, high level administrators who are thus exempt from overtime pay. Under the law, professionals and executives, too, are excluded. Organizers earn $1,000 a week and receive allowances for transportation and other expenses that add up to about $10,000 a year, according to the union. Organizers also receive health insurance.

The organizers say they are low-level non-professionals who were doing grunt work for the union: hanging around campuses on the prowl for potential adjunct members.

“Here we were organizing a group of people teaching two classes a week and we were fighting for them to have benefits, and the organizers weren’t getting paid for anything,” Ms. Schutt, who is currently unemployed, said. “It was completely unfair.”

Ms. Schutt said organizers are told by the union, which renegotiated the adjuncts’ contract with NYU last spring, that they will have to work long hours during certain periods called “blitz weeks,” often preceding union elections.

“A blitz would supposedly go for a week and it would last for six weeks,” she said. “It was very manipulative.”

She said the long hours frequently took their toll on the organizers, who she said feared losing their jobs if they tried to scale back. If they quit, they would risk not qualifying for unemployment benefits.

Stationed at buildings for hours at a time, when Ms. Schutt got hungry she ate fast food, she said. “You were eating bad food because you didn’t have time to do anything – dry cleaning, laundry. All you were doing was working.”

Vito DeStefano, another complainant in the case, said when he was hired by the union,” I was told we were in a campaign, … you do that for two or three weeks and suck it up.” Mr. DeStefano, who said he worked 60 to 70 hours a week during three stints between May 2002 and September 2003, said the campaign would then bled into an other, newly announced campaign. “It never ends,” he said.

“We were told if you don’t like it, quit,” he said.

Ms. Kushner, the UAW official, said Ms. Schutt served as a union representative during hearings before the National Labor Relations Board, a task that required her to “figure out the day-to-day strategy of labor board cases.”

Of her time as a representative during the hearings, Ms. Schutt said: “I was basically taking the notes. It really wasn’t that hard.”

Ms. Kushner called the job “tough work” but said the $1,000-a-week pay, not including allowances, is “high compensation.”

Her sub-regional office employs between 3 and 15 organizers, she said.

An NYU law professor, Samuel Estreicher, who directs the school’s Center for Labor and Employment Law, said he believes the organizers “should be covered by overtime laws.”

“These guys are arguably the staff of the union,” he said. “They are engaged in producing the basic product or service.”

He said the union was “obviously not managing these people well.”

Mr. DeStefano, who organized a union at a housing agency before moving to the UAW, said, “I still believe in unions.”

He criticized the UAW for trying to “have it both ways.”

“If an employer was doing this and there was a union at that place, the UAW would say, ‘You can’t do this,’ “Mr. DeStefano said. “It’s hypocritical.”

A primary concern expressed on the official Web site of the UAW is the refusal by some employers to pay their employees overtime.

“Business has always hated the mandatory overtime provisions of the FSLA,” a 2003 article from Skill Magazine, a publication of the UAW, states. “The overtime requirement may not be waived by any agreement between the employer and the worker.”