A majority of blue & black collar type jobs (in addition to factories, warehousing, and trucking) usually require and have more overtime hours/opportunities when compared to white collar jobs… which makes me wonder why certain manual labor & driving type jobs have the ability to offer as much OT as needed, even though it all depends on the job itself?
I’ve heard that it’s cheaper and more convenient for companies to pay their current employees at their overtime rate instead of hiring/training more employees…
Furthermore, if you ever worked at a blue or black collar company, what were your hours like and did you enjoy working more than the average office employee?
My thoughts precisely. In the “lovely” U.S. workforce, the colloquial terms are “blue collar” (generally meaning trade jobs, like a plumber or mechanic) and “white collar” (office jobs) plus the ever-so-lovely “pink collar” (traditionally women’s jobs, like nurses and kindergarten teachers) but … black collar?
Never heard that. Does that mean something nefarious?
Say “collar color” three times fast, and 1a.) it starts to sound really weird, and 2b.) to me, there’s some classist/caste/slavery undertones that start to shine through.
Are you talking about overtime pay for hourly workers vs. non-hourly?
In the U.S. for example, salaried workers (usually but not always lumped in with “white collar”) do not earn overtime pay, by law. Hourly workers get paid overtime.
It’s the whole exempt/nonexempt thing.
Is that what your O.P. is asking about, or am I being whooooooshed?
I’m in HR, and I’d never heard the term black collar before. But according to the internet, which is never wrong, it’s a job in an occupation that’s typically very dirty like working on an oil rig. Apparently there’s a whole bunch of different collared jobs including red, orange, and even green for military. I’ve never known anyone in the military refer to their green collar job.
For the OP, what you’re talking about are non-exempt workers. According to the US Department of Labor, Non-exempt workers are typically “manual laborers or other ‘blue-collar’ workers who perform work involving repetitive operations with their hands, physical skill and energy.” Managing a workforce can actually be rather complicated, but generally speaking, if a company constantly has to have their employees working overtime in order to conduct business then it’s indicative of a systemic problem. It might appear at first glance that this is cheaper than just hiring more employees, but in the meanwhile you have overworked employees who are stressed out and less productive and probably have a high turnover rate. All of which can be more expensive than just hiring more people.
When I worked in banking, overtime was rare. It typically meant computer system problems, where people had to hang out until the system came back up because the transactions had to be processed that day. We had a period where the workload jumped due to a merger and it took a month to hire more people and train them. We had a half dozen people quit because they had to stay late five days in a row. Requiring OT, even when it was clearly temporary, was unacceptable to many.
At Amazon, aside from Christmas there was almost no mandatory overtime, but the high turnover and absence rate meant more hours were almost always available and I knew numerous people that worked the maximum numbers of hours (55) voluntarily every week for years (and had a second job besides). Being able to opt out seemed to make it a non-issue.
My first job, working as a manager at a pizza chain, 60-hour weeks were the norm and if you didn’t like it, don’t become a manager. Most people lasted 4 or 5 years till burnout.
Why do some employers of hourly workers offer lots of OT? Why don’t they simply have more workers and not pay the premium price for OT?
I can’t provide a comprehensive answer, but IMO that is the question.
But here’s an anecdote
I retired from a high-end hourly job. We had OT available. But we didn’t have traditional 40-hour schedules so the pricing of OT was not the simple 1.5x > 40h most folks are used to.
The central issue was that our industry had high seasonality and low worker mobility. You stayed with one employer for most of a career. The fixed cost of an incremental employee was huge. Hiring and layoffs were also mongo expensive.
If they needed 400 people during slow season and 600 people during busy season, the cheapest way to do that was to have 450 workers, offer lots of vacation during slow season, no vacation during busy season, and push everyone to a maxed out planned schedule during busy season then offer OT at an hourly rate increment over straight time on top of that.
The post immediately above yours answers the question. As does the wiki cited earlier. It’s a dirty job.
Michael Scott, addressing the office and warehouse staffs:
Now, you may look around and see two groups here. White collar, blue collar. But I don’t see it that way. And you know why not? Because I am collar-blind.
One reason is because an employee costs much more than their salary. Benefits are often a significant percentage of an employer’s cost per worker. Better to pay overtime than put a new person on payroll if you can avoid it.
And for high turnover jobs, what does the employer care if a worker burns out in four months instead of six?
I am a salary non-exempt blue collar factory worker. A number of years ago when the kids were young and my wife working part time I did a fair amount of overtime for financial reasons. Now, basically empty nesters I avoid overtime if I can, and if there is an opportunity in the middle of the work week to go home, I’m gone. Want to enjoy my free time now that I am older.
As far as hiring more people instead of paying out overtime it was explained to me it is much cheaper to pay me the time and a half than to pay the “visible wage” plus the “hidden benefits” such as 401k, part of the health insurance premium, social security, etc… HR in their benefits review told us these hidden benefits more than double what our visible wage is, so my $24.00/hour (for example) is actually over $48.00/hour in wage costs to the employer.
It’s a relative of a friend of mine so this is a little bit patchy/second-hand information, but (obviously?) you live on the oil rig; they don’t chopper you back and forth each night. It’s long hours, but you are on some sort of shift system. She was chief engineer; I don’t know how her conditions compare to that of a random roughneck (except her position/status supposedly insulated her from sexual harassment to at least some extent).
This is something we ponder every year with our city budget with the fire department. What @LSLGuy described is exactly how it happens - you anticipate swings in need for workers, and budget in overtime pay. You do not want to pay people with full benefits to sit around and not be productive, so it’s flat out cheaper to pay people time-and-a-half on occasion to fill gaps. If the data shows your overtime line item is getting to be higher than the cost of another full time worker, you budget for a full time worker and then your overtime pay line item goes down.
In our city service department the swings in need for workers comes mainly in the summer, which is a long enough period to hire part-timers instead of increasing overtime. Also the work being performed is low-skill, so you can fill in the gaps with almost any warm body. For the fire department the qualifications are more rigorous and the ups-and-downs of staffing needs are more frequent, so it’s better to give your existing crew more hours than to pull in part-time staff.
My dad worked at a Ford stamping plant for years and experienced the same thing. He had lots of overtime opportunities over the years, and lots of downtime.
Others have mentioned the benefits angle. Another part is easier budget management. If we’re selling everything we can make, let’s run that overtime. The machinist wage on overtime is still less than the hourly cost of machine they’re running. When things slow down, just don’t run overtime. No need to let people go or cut hours below forty. Onboarding skilled personnel like machinists is HARD.
I was on the town finance committee for a while, and we had exactly this conversation every year. I appreciated their position, but sometimes couldn’t get past the feeling that they were also protecting that overtime.
This. There is a training period for any noob, whether that’s getting them access or showing them how to run the machine/program. Even a certified firefighter can’t necessarily just go to another department & be fully ready to Day 1. Different depts layout the truck compartments differently, have different response procedures, have different radio codes, etc.
In addition to what has been mentioned already about costing less than hiring more people who aren’t needed during slow times , there are also different types of overtime. There’s the sort of overtime where you need x people working on a particular shift for whatever reason, you only have x-1 scheduled. Depending on how often and how predictably that happens , it may or may not be worth hiring an extra person. But there’s another type of overtime that you really can’t do much about. With that sort of overtime, something happens during the shift that causes the overtime and it’s impractical/impossible for one reason or another to turn the situation over to someone else. Maybe a police officer arrests someone half an hour before the shift is over, and the arrestee needs to be taken to the hospital and after a few hours at the hospital the arrestee is brought to court where the police officer has to stay a little longer to speak to prosecutor. Or a CPS worker gets assigned an investigation an hour before the shift is over and kids have to be removed and brought to a foster home. Maybe the sanitation truck gets stuck in traffic and finishes its route two hours late .Or the plumber (who works full time for the housing complex) is halfway done with fixing the toilet when the shift ends. With that type of overtime, hiring more staff won’t help.
U.S. workforce, the colloquial terms are “blue collar” (generally meaning trade jobs, like a plumber or mechanic) and “white collar” (office jobs) plus the ever-so-lovely “pink collar” (traditionally women’s jobs, like nurses and kindergarten teachers) but … black collar?