And if this practice is common across all major employers in a field (and to cut to the chase, it is in this field), then the solution is…go back to school and get a new degree? Quit and work at McDonalds? And in this economy especially it’s not even easy, or possible, to find another employer.
I guess then the solution is to do nothing. Then of course one could argue that it’s really stupid to force the people who work on safety-related equipment and designs which are intended for the Public to be worked to the edge of absolute mental and physical exhaustion. The same goes for physicians.
Do whatever you want, just don’t ruin things for the rest of us. Maybe you guys need to organize a union.
Only if you want to revel in a sense of helplessness.
One could argue that, and if the government wants to regulate how workers on its projects must be treated, I guess that’s OK. But most of us don’t work in such an environment, so don’t make sweeping changes for the benefit of a tiny minority of people.
No, AFAICT this has become the new normal. 40 years ago, it may have balanced out, with exempt employees working OT for free at busy times, but being able to take an unscheduled afternoon or two off when things were slack. And that was the whole point of being exempt.
What I hear from friends in a number of different lines of work is what Una reports: that there’s a lot of unpaid OT, but those free afternoons off are mythical, because things are never slack.
It’s quite natural that it should be this way: if an employer pays a fixed amount for an employee’s first 40 hours in a week, but pays zero for each additional hour, the employer has an economic incentive to extract as many additional hours from the employee as he can.
So I have to agree with Una that one way or another, the incentives need to be changed. And other than ending the practice of free OT, I don’t see how you do this.
But OTOH, I agree that it makes no sense to be paying top management by the hour. So how do you balance this?
My longtime idea has been that persons making less than a given amount (e.g. $60K/year) get paid time and a half for OT. Everybody making more than $60K annually would get reimbursed for OT at the rate that the $60K people get. At $90K, you’d be getting straight time for OT; if you were a top exec getting $400K/year in salary, you’d be getting 15% of your underlying hourly rate for OT, and you might or might not bother to claim the time.
The end goal, of course, is to prevent unnecessary abuse of employees, not to force everyone onto the same schedule. The suggested schedule is merely a means to that end, one which doesn’t necessarily work.
I think it is important to have a baseline and 40hours/week seems like a good number. I suppose it could be a bit higher or lower, but the important point is that it is there at all as a standard so the guy who works 60/week knows that he should be compensated for such work and the guy asked to work 90/week knows it is unreasonable.
Without a standard baseline, it is harder to see where you stand with respect to everyone else.
Also, I think the argument is that if you have a bunch of people working 80hours per week, then you should be hiring more people. I know this is easier said than done, but from a political point of view, I can see that as a motivating reason for a 40hr/week law.
Semiconductor companies are notorious for this. Rather than hire enough people for a given project, they just force a smaller group of salaried engineers to work 60-80 hours/week. It’s a basic bottom line thing – most of these companies have enormous cash reserves, but why hire more people than you have to? Once it’s standard practice across the industry, your employees have no recourse: they either put up with it or abandon the years of training and experience to start fresh in a different field.
I absolutely don’t think the government should legally compel companies to keep a 40 hour maximum work week, but I would love to see something put in place to create an economic differentiation between an engineer who works 40 hours/week vs. one who works 70. If it costs a company more to have someone working 70 hours/week, they may be more inclined to staff projects realistically and, more importantly, less inclined to lay off anyone who wants to have a life outside of work. (Women with kids tend to be at an extreme disadvantage, for example, since they simply can’t be at work for 12 hours/day.)
I was in management many years ago when GM sent us a study with that information. It was in engineering. So we read the paper and followed the GM orders…We immediately scheduled everybody 12 hrs a day 7 days a week to make a shot at an impossible delivery date.
In the healthcare field there have been several studies about the impact of overtime and hospital problems. The Boorman report in 99 said 40 percent of serious mistakes were attributable to long hours. These were mistakes from fatigue. Two other studies linked infectious outbreaks to excessive overtime.
Read about the air traffic controllers lately?
No one denies that burnout can occur, but you still haven’t backed up the claim that “After 10 hours the work is practically worthless.” There is an enormous difference between a 10/5 week and a 12/7 one. Past 12 hours you’re likely to start cutting into sleep, eating, hygiene, etc.–things with known negative effects from deprivation–but 10 hours doesn’t really carry that risk.
This truly does concern me. Problem is, it’s not going to be fixed from the inside. Nurses LOVE 4 12 hour shifts instead of 6 8’s…it gets them 2 extra days off every week! Unfortunately, their work sucks, and people die. But, just as in every other arena of mental and physical impairment, no one wants to admit that they’re impaired. It must be those *other *nurses who are making mistakes when they’re tired.
So it’s not going to be fixed by nursing unions. Hospitals haven’t fixed it, because they can schedule with fewer staff members. This one, if it ever gets fixed, will HAVE to be fixed by pressure from the outside. That’s not to say via a government mandate, mind you. There’s already some rumblings about changing hours because Medicare is no longer paying for treatment of hospital acquired infections or bed sores, and insurance companies are beginning to refuse as well. It’s all about the $$$.
And nurses’ schedules aren’t even a drop in the bucket compared to a first year Resident’s. It’s amazing they can even walk a straight line, much less practice medicine.
It’s not about a sprinkling of afternoons off. It’s about not punching a clock and not working a set schedule.
When you’re hired as an exempt employee, you’re not being hired to work a 40 hour week. If that’s what you want, you should set yourself up as a contract worker. When you say you want to be paid by the hour, you are saying you don’t want to be seen as someone who will advance through the ranks.
It’s not free overtime, but if you really feel it is, convince your boss to hire you as a contract employee or form a union with your fellow workers.
I don’t understand the second sentence in the second paragraph.
You are trying to completely revamp the way people are paid in the US, when that is the way it is done everywhere in the developed world. Can you see that I might be a little skeptical of the government forcing every company to do something that no company has ever had to do anywhere in the world, ever? This is not a minor tweak of the system, although I’m not claiming you are saying it is. It’s just a huge change, and I don’t see what problem we are trying to solve.
Absolutely no part of getting paid for hours worked requires either a time clock or a set schedule.
The problem of exempt workers being forced to work hours which put the quality of their lives and work at risk, and who have no other real options because the industry is structured around that practice.
It also affects their health and their marriages. The Japanese used to keel over at their desks and die. That is what our companies are striving for. That kind of control.
A friend of mine worked in Colorado as a computer engineer. (Or whatever the term is nowadays.)
He’d saunter in at 9:30 and leave at 3:30. That’s when he got paid hourly. When he went to salary, they gave him a ton of benefits. So he’d clock in at 8 and leave at 3:30 unless something major was going on. In shorts/jeans/t shirt/whatever, of course. (:
He worked from home a lot. Plenty of times he’d have a conference call on a Monday because he’d left for the weekend and everyone was fine with it. So long as the stuff got done…sigh.
I wonder if there might be a decent compromise position regarding mandated maximum hours for exempt workers that revolved around a longer time period?
My current workplace has pretty much all exempt employees, and our general expectation is that (for people not on government contracts, where 40-hour weeks are strictly enforced due to contract terms) people will work 2080 hours a year, which works out to 40-hour weeks. It leaves the freedom for people to do 4x10 or 3x13.5 schedules, and for people to crunch a few 80-hour weeks and then disappear for a month, and it seems to work out pretty well.
I don’t have much problem with that (the only problem being that I think there should be a limit on the continuous time on the job, speaking as someone who’s worked 30 hours without sleep or a break, even for an actual meal, on more than one occasion).
The main problem is that Engineers are being forced to work 2,500, 3,000, or more hours per year for the pay and benefits of 2,080.
