I had about 600K at the beginning of the year, but now I’m down to around 410K. Same with free rental car days and hotels. It helps.
As a salaried employee I don’t mind traveling on the weekends. We fly to India semi-regularly and almost everyone assumes you have to eat the weekends on both ends. I usually fly out Friday night, arriving Sunday morning so I have a day to recover before a full week of meetings.
It’s part of the job, and while the explicit policy is a bit unusual I can sort of understand their reasoning. They’re paying for my room and board on those days, just not my salary. But I’ve been called on to work more than 40 hours a week pretty much every week of my working life (without additional pay) so it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.
I have never had a salaried job, and have held several hourly jobs that required a 7 day workweek. I worked hundreds of days in a row, usually around 300 in between days-off. So I get a chuckle when people complain about working 6 days in a row or a night or weekend.
All that said, in this topic I am much more understanding of the OP’s point than having a contest about who has it worse. If an employer expected me to travel great distances for my job, I would expect to do that on company time. And I could never imagine seeing compulsory work-related travel as a “perk.” If someone owns and controls my time, I don’t see how that is a perk. The business paying for my travel and lodging is a business expense required for the company to have me do whatever it is they want me to do for them. If that’s a benefit for me, I suppose my employer providing a chair at my desk (if I had one, never had an office or a seat), electricity, and a floor free of rusty nails and broken glass are all personal benefits of my employment.
I once had to travel to Australia on business. In order to make my Monday morning meeting in Sydney, I had to leave Toronto on a Friday night–the International Date Line meant that I shouldn’t blink, otherwise I might miss Saturday.
I arrived in Sydney on Sunday morning, and spent that day “recovering” from the long flight. I made my Monday-morning meeting.
My personal time on the weekend was shot–23 hours in transit, plus crossing the Date Line, where I lost a day. But travelling on a weekend was just part of the job, in order to get there for Monday morning. I dealt.
In the case you cite, though, the weekend travel was unavoidable, since the meeting in question was on a Monday. In the OP’s case, there’s absolutely no logistical reason why he couldn’t return home on Friday instead of Saturday. That makes a difference.
(Unfortunately?) I’m encountering fare restrictions on available flights meeting my boss’ requirements. The cheapest fares include layovers and indirect travel, so travel time is in excess of 30 hours. Our fare policy states cheapest possible fare + $100 is the most we can spend, and the (more) direct flights are all at least 2 or 3 times the cheapest fare. My original schedule was relatively inexpensive. What a pain in the ass this is.
In that case, you need to go and have a chat with your boss NOW and discover the real reason he’s so intent on wasting both your time and the company’s money by having you stay in London on Friday. And if it’s because he wanted that Friday after the meeting to count as a PTO day, stand your ground. PTO/vacation days are not a gift, they’re part of your total compensation package - and you should no more tolerate the theft of them than you’d tolerate your employer helping himself to a few hundred dollars out of your paycheck.
It’s one thing to have to sometimes WORK nights and weekends when you’re salaried. It’s quite another to be told you must waste your personal time for no good reason, and to be stolen from. Presumably you don’t steal from your employer, so don’t let him steal from you!
I told him. He’s got bigger fish to fry at the moment, but he understands what I’m encountering. I’ll probably end up traveling on my originally-intended schedule, but we’ll have to wait and see. They’re more mindful of actual dollars than my salary dollars, so if I can make a legitimate case that my Tuesday-Friday travel schedule can save them $4,000 they will likely approve. Bah.
Also, artemis, for what it’s worth, I appreciate that you understand my situation. I think many of the drive-by posters did not.
I’m not sure if you use a company travel site for booking, but if you do there are several “tricks” that can make some of those low fares disappear. One of the easiest: Try looking up the flights you actually want on the airline’s site, and then severely restrict your arrival and departure times to match your desired flight.
That might not work depending on how your corporate travel site is configured, but it might be worth putting out there for others.
At least it’s nice to know you’re dealing with a silly inflexible corporate policy rather than a boss who’s under the delusion that he owns his employees. A good boss makes a big difference!
This is one reason I’m quite ambivalent of the widespread use of salaried positions in the US. The basic idea is sound: there are in fact many jobs which can’t be pigeonholed into a 9-5 time slot, or where the volume of work to be done can vary suddenly and unpredictably. It’s appropriate that those jobs be salaried positions. Companies can use the guise of salaried positions to get away with underpaying their workforce, though, if we let them. And as Patriotgrrl’s response to your post shows, there are plenty of people out there who are willing to let them do it.
You’re welcome. I hope you manage to get the mess sorted out - or if you have to stay over, you get compensation (either in time or in money) for that forced Friday “vacation” day.
Winston - how big is this company? All of the larger companies that I have worked for had a written travel policy that covered exactly this situation. Obviously, being salaried means you work the hours required to get the job done, but I agree that this does not sound like time required.
I’m also curious as to the real reason(s) behind this request. You are on salary, so overtime is not an issue. If you work the hours required to get the job done, loss of productivity can’t be the issue either (unless there had been previous problems with the job not getting done). I’m at a loss to find a business reason for the request. If it’s just a control issue (“I’m the boss and things will be done my way!”), that’s bad news. Those type issues rarely get better and often get worse.
We’re around 1400 employees. The reason behind this isn’t 100% clear. My boss can be an obstinate prick, so it could just be that. But we’ve got a new Director and he’s pushing new policy around performance. I’ve got a couple slackers on my team that I think they are trying to chase out of here, and there’s a lot of talk about longer hours and things like that. Very little of that reaches me, because I work my ass off, and perform consistently at a very high level, but if they’re telling everyone else to work harder, they’ve got to tell me, too, I guess. I had a long talk yesterday with this new Director (which I initiated) and asked him, point blank, if he was happy with my work. He is. I also asked him what I need to do to ensure I continue to be successful here, and he told me to just keep on doing what I’ve been doing.
My colleagues think this is in advance of all of us being outsourced, but I don’t think so. I think there’s two people on the team that have been coasting and the policies are designed to torture them into quitting, because they are both in protected classes and it’s not desirable to fire them.
Eons ago when I worked for GM, I was salaried in the most stereotypical context there is, so I was always on the clock. Travel on Saturday or Sunday, tough noogies, you’re going and you’re not getting paid anything extra.
The rest of my career, I’ve been either Civil Service or a contractor to the Feds, and the same accounting rules apply. If the US Government is ultimately picking up the tab, you travel on the clock. In addition, my present employer also requires travel on the clock for insurance purposes. I did a trip that was not related to a government contract, and still was on the clock for that. 
To the OP look at it this way.
The company is flying you at their expense all the way to London for you to play tourist for a day.
Yeah, that’s normally exactly how I’d look at it. I think other factors have me a little sour, but I’m getting past it.
That’s a fine way for Winston_Smith to look at it only if that free tourist day isn’t coming out of his vacation time and he doesn’t have something important to do on that weekend that’s he’s going to have to cancel if he’s forced to fly home on Saturday instead of Friday. Otherwise it’s just a failed attempt to make lemonade from a lemon.
My original itinerary (Tuesday-Friday) just got approved. LOL.
yay! Victory:D
Hurrah! It’s always sweet when common sense wins a victory.