The new income threshold is $47K or so. While I’m never a fan of increasing the cost of labor, this is an area where businesses have just been exploitative, putting people on salary who they expect to be at their beck and call 24/7 but paying them as if they aren’t all that important. It’s just overtime avoidance and it’s good that the administration is dealing with that problem. That’s my view, anyway. Any dissent?
No dissent from me - this is long overdue. If people are so indispensable that they need to be available 24/7, then pay them accordingly
Yes, in my old job we had retail store managers making $32,000/year working 60 hours a week. I’m glad they’ll be getting a bump.
The Times article on this quoted some business reps who were against it. Reason one was that this would tend to make “managers” paid little into hourly employees, and this being a demotion they would think it not worth getting more money for the same hours or more time.
The second was that these “managers” would not be allowed to take the afternoon off to go to their kids ball game. First, I somehow doubt they have this flexibility, second, the extra money for the extra hours would more than make up not getting paid for taking time off.
Yes most of these “Managers” whom are making less than 3 X min-wage are not executives but also do not have the power to fight their illegally exempt status. Note that they can still be “salaried” while making less than 47K a year. It is just that their base pay cannot be reduced for working less than 40 and they need to be compensated for working more than 40.
I just LOVE Obama. I wish he was President back in the 1990s when I was a salaried department manager at a big box store, being bullied and harassed by store and assistant store managers into working longer hours without any extra compensation. I know many of my colleagues that ended up working longer hours for LESS hourly pay then their employees, and actually demoted themselves. On top of that, they would systematically cut my staff, and then give me shit when I took a day off and was understaffed, because hey, they didn’t have to pay me overtime.
And any greedy business owners/executives that are whining this will cut into their ability to buy a shiny new Mercedes? Bump your managers pay from $35,000 to $50,000 and you’ll see how grateful they are to work those extra hours.
My company’s lawyers determined that anyone working at the first two employment levels are non-exempt and anyone promoted to a point past that is exempt. Problem was that this meant people getting promoted were in some cases taking big pay cuts, since they were expected to work the same hours but no longer qualified for overtime. It’s an issue that supervisors have to dance around.
I worked one place where we all were expected to work about 60 hiurs a week, through management incompetence from falling behind and from trying to show we were tough. We made more than even the new max for overtime. If you can’t make money without working a lot of employees this long, I contend you are incompetent, and trying to survive on the backs of the workers. A week, sure, but as a long term policy? Capitalism is tough.
I’m basically in favor of this and feel like it’s long overdue. The only concern is whether the administration moved too far, too quickly. Time will tell, I guess. But to have a retail store manager working 50-60 hours per week at $25,000 an hour is exploitative and one of the reasons for the growth of the working poor.
Even if the worst happens and these businesses decide to turn these employees into hourly employees, someone still has to do the work. There will be some restructuring by businesses, so maybe they go to hourly, but so what. They may get paid less but they won’t work 60 hours a week either. With an increase in the minimum wage, they’ll probably get paid more by the hour when compared to ‘salary’.
It’s hard to see how any employees come out behind. Employers will either cut these workers to 40 hours, in which they make the same as they did before but work less, or they’ll bump them up so they can keep working them more than 40 hours.
Exploit me! exploit me!
It’s still below the original real cap. But it seems like frequent, smaller adjustments would be less disruptive.
I’m generally not in favor of most legislated wage rules. But if you’re going to have them, index them in some fashion. IIRC the new policy will have some three -year cycle. It would also be better without a sharp cutoff. But I’m not sure how that would be implemented.
Yeah, the problem here is in employer expectations. Overtime should be either a) voluntary, or b) infrequent. If you expect a particular employee to work 60 hours a week every week, you are short staffed and need to hire another employee. When overtime isn’t a normal, expected part of working somewhere, then you don’t need to worry about “promoting” someone to a salaried position and it turning into a pay cut.
Also, the idea that you can work a salaried employee 60-70 hours a week with no compensation is shitty. Part of the deal with a salary is that those kinds of hours should be rare. I earn a salary. Sometimes, when deadlines are tight, or some other urgent work is required, I’ll work my ass off 60+ hours a week, 12-16 hour days, etc. And I don’t expect extra compensation because I know any other week I can come in late, leave early, or take a half day for a doctor’s appointment, sick kid, or errands. But no way am I going to do that amount of work on a regular basis. If I work over 45 hours in a week more than a handful of times in a year, I consider that my manager’s problem. Hire someone else to take the pressure off or tell the customer we’ve hit a snag and the schedule must be pushed back.
Not so simple. We’re a consulting firm and we juggle multiple projects and client deadlines. Needing to sometimes stay late is part of the expectation.
It’s sort of quasi-voluntary, in that there are people who tend to have much lower levels of overtime than others. But at the end of the year, when you’re doing the annual reviews, those are not going to be the highest rated employees. The go-getters and workaholics who have no problems with the overtime will blow past them.
So if you give over your entire life to the company, they might throw you a few scraps.
Did you ever think of evaluating the quality of their work rather than how many hours they work or how much ass kissing they do?
Did you ever consider that the high hour people are giving 60 hours but doing work that should only take 40?
Of course all those things are also considered. Not sure why you would assume otherwise.
Generally speaking - and contrary to your apparent assumption - the people putting in a lot of overtime tend to be the ones who are more efficient and do more high quality work. This is because people who are inefficient and/or do poor-quality work are not sought after for project work.
If your job is in danger it isn’t “quasi-voluntary”.
Exempt implies that you don’t have a set schedule. If you can do your duties in 15 hours a week then that’s OK but that is with the understanding that you may need to work 60-80 a few weeks a year (and BTW if you are exempt then comp time does not exist despite the arrangement your boss makes with you.) so it seems to me that if the primary part of your job is to be on duty for set times then by definition you are non-exempt. It doesn’t matter if you are called the fry-machine lead or customer service manager; if your job involves being on-site at specific times you are owed overtime if you’re working over 40 hours.
I work in a consulting firm too. If you have enough projects and tight enough deadlines that your employees are forced by necessity to work 60 hour weeks on a regular basis, you are short staffed or your projects/customer relations are poorly managed.
Once in a while is expected. That’s what we get a salary or overtime for. Sometimes, shit hits the fan, and to satisfy an important customer, people have to work late/weekends. But if shit keeps hitting the fan, week after week, with any amount of frequency, you need to hire more workers or fire your manager(s) and find someone better. Probably both.
It goes without saying that you shouldn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to get a good annual review. That kind of expectation is what causes burnout and coincidentally, poorly managed projects, slipped deadlines, and pissed off customers. If you’re a fly-by-night outfit trying to capitalize on a short-term oil boom or something, that kind of management style might work, temporarily. But if you’re trying to stay in business and keep both employees and customers over the long term, “mandatory overtime for everyone all the time” is a very poor policy.
Nitpick: Salaried means that your base pay is not reduced for quantity or quality of work as long as an absence is less than a full day (Kindof). Exempt only means that you also will not receive overtime pay due to various conditions.
Exempt only implies that you don’t have a set schedule because it applies to Salaried individuals.