Does that mean that when I finish my assigned work I can go home and still get paid for the full week?
As opposed to the current system, where after I finish my assigned work I get handed a stack of somebody else’s work which they haven’t been able to finish because they’ve been standing around talking.
Or do I then get paid overtime for the hours I spend doing other people’s work?
No, honestly, I love my job. It’s the assholes I have to work with I can’t stand.
I would say yes, but it doesn’t appear to be that way normally.
I am a manager and have an informal 7-9 hour day. If we’re not busy or you get done then leave after 7 hours. If not, stay up to nine hours. My thoughts are that it should ‘even out’. If it were abused, which it hasn’t been, then I might have to do something.
There are times when we get real busy and stay longer but, thankfully, they are not common.
However, if ‘upper management’ were to find out about this, I’m sure they would disapprove.
This works in theory but it’s nearly impossible to fire a Federal employee. It’s a double-edged sword and can result in workers becoming lazy. I was working with a couple of near-imcompetents prior to my promotion. One is deaf and I think he uses his disability to get away with stuff the rest of us wouldn’t. The other is a woman who, as far as I can tell, spends most of her time either on the phone or trying to figure out what lottery numbers are going to win next. This woman I cannot understand, if she’d work harder she would have a better shot at a promotion, which would mean having more disposable income to spend on lotto tickets. Of course, it would be in her best interest to realize that there is no fucking way she’s going to win the lottery!
Well, that’s fine for those government workers who are actually exempt from the overtime requirements and are salaried amd therefore not docked leave time or pay for leaving a half-hour early for a doctor’s appointment. Most aren’t. And it sounds like the OP isn’t salaried. BTW, the private sector can’t legally force most employees to work overtime with no extra pay.
I don’t understand this. Of course they can! They can’t force you to work for them but they can insist you get your work done. If you don’t get it done, you’re incompetent and will be fired for incompetence.
Maybe our ‘worlds’ are not equivalent…if you’re talking about floorsweepers or such…
I am a manager. It is expected that I work 50-55 hours per week minimum. The people I supervise are considered to be professional and get their work done. I don’t hover over them unless they are being trained. I give them a deadline and they get it done. They know what they are doing and I know that they know what they are doing.
I suppose if one of my employees came to me and insisted on ‘overtime’ and I didn’t wish to fire him, I would do something like this. If his current salary was $50,000 per year, I would give him 10 hours at overtime at time and a half == 15 hours normal pay.
I would set his salary at $36,347 per year plus overtime. Guess what, he makes $50,000 per year. However, his butt would be sitting at work the full 10 hours per day, every day.
Looks like walmart got busted…
bwaah-hah-hah…
http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/news/article.asp?aid=32580
I put in four 10 hour days between Sunday and Wednesday and have the option of working an extra 10 hours at my regular rate every week.
If I go over 10 hours a day or 50 hours a week I get paid overtime, this is something that needs to be approved by management as the non-profit organization I work for can’t afford to be paying extreme amounts of overtime.
I usually end up working more than 10 hours a day and will take that that extra time off with pay some other time during the week. This is fine for me.
Not having the option to receive overtime or take time off would suck ass.
Not so much that our worlds are different- but you’re not noticing the people in your world who have jobs that never get done, and who will lose pay if they leave early. (Because if you can be docked an hour’s pay, you clearly are an hourly employee and are entitled to overtime) Like receptionists, secretaries,file clerks, retail workers, nurses,bus drivers,cooks,social workers,security guards,maintenance workers, etc. And the fact that a job is “professional” in the sense of requiring a college degree or specialized training isn’t enough to make make it exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act You’ll notice this line :** Subject to certain exceptions set forth in the regulations, in order to be considered “salaried”, employees must receive their full salary for any workweek in which they perform any work without regard to the number of days or hours worked.** It might apply to the people you supervise, but it doesn’t apply to most employees.
doreen hit the nail on the head.
Not all jobs are the kinds with “projects” that have a deadline. People who work in stores don’t have deadlines, usually. They are stuck there as long as the store is open, and the customers are buying stuff. Where’s the deadline there?
I remember at an old retail job I had, we had a big sale and were open late. The boss wanted us to work overtime to cover the extra time we were open. Now, why should we be expected to work that extra time without getting paid for it? Had we slacked off and not met our “deadline”? No, the main office wanted to make more of a profit and sell more stuff, and they needed us there to sell the stuff for them. Why shouldn’t they pay us for the extra time we put in?
I currently work with developmentally disabled people. They ALWAYS need care. There is no deadline, just day in, day out work. More than occasionally I am asked to do overtime. When I do overtime, shouldn’t I get paid for it? Overtime at my job is always because of understaffing—there are not enough people to cover all shifts. When they need us to work 16 hours at a stretch because they can’t find anyone to relieve us, shouldn’t we get paid overtime? Is it unreasonable of us to expect that?
I mean, seriously. A LOT of jobs are of this type. And there is no way in hell I am going to get stuck doing extra hours without getting paid for them.
My apologies for bumping this but I thought it would be better than opening a new thread just to announce:
One of my bosses just emailed the office looking for people to work OT next week!
I sure hope I can get in on that. Gives me incentive to concentrate more on work instead of the SDMB.
Jeff, I just want to make sure I understand, you’re unhappy that you’re not getting overtime, but you don’t actually concentrate on WORK when you’re working? Seems to me that you shouldn’t get overtime, you should be working when you’re on the clock, then we wouldn’t NEED overtime.
Is there any reason I shouldn’t think that you’re stealing my tax money?
Sure there is. My salary comes directly from patent and trademark attorneys. Taxpayer money is only indirectly involved via Congress wrangling about the budget every year. 
Don’t get me wrong, I do concentrate on work but what I do is quite tedious. I come here to keep myself awake. There are days when I come here too often and end up being 10 short of my quota. With the prospect of overtime, there’s incentive to not pay as much attention to other things. Gotta make quota every day if I want to do overtime that afternoon.
Ahhhh, I’m hearing ya now. Too often I hear about people slacking off during the day and ‘making up’ for that lack of effort by getting time and a half after 5pm. Stuff like that really cheeses me off, especially if it’s my money getting paid out.
The occasional slack to keep your sanity is A-OK in my book. Carry on. Nothing to see here.
And to that I give you a hardy fuck you!!!
So according to you the only reason to make quota is to be able to work more overtime? Whatever happened to doing the job you were hired for?
Having the prospect of overtime is an incentive but not the only one. As you said, there’s also the simple satisfaction of a job well done, which is impacted by morale, which itself would be improved with being able to work overtime. Personally, my morale would be improved if I could just get some recognition for when I do good work and I don’t mean the usual end-of-year monetary award.
BTW: you sure you have enough exclamation points up there? 
I actually just got switched from salaried to hourly with overtime, because our HR folks stumbled upon a relatively new california law that indicates that Programmers who make any less than 93k a year cannot be considered exempt of OT laws. So now if I do work overtime, instead of just having to suck it up, I get time-and-a-half. Wish this had been around a few years ago when i sacrificed a whole summer to 85 hour work weeks to meet a project rollout deadline…
I hear ya, some of my colleagues have been known to use overtime as “make-up time”.
To expand on my morale comment earlier, we have people on the data entry end who meet their quota by 300%. This is accomplished by evidently not paying complete attention to what they type. The fact that they’ve been recognized for quantity even though their quality is questionable hurts the morale of those like myself whose job is to make sure the data is correct. Seems like management would rather just blame us editors for not catching the errors instead of trying to make sure those errors don’t exist in the first place. It’s like being in a Dilbert strip.
And in case anyone’s wondering, I’m currently two short of my quota and still have two hours left before I leave for the day.
Hooray! I’m 12 minutes into my first overtime in almost 10 months!
What do you do? If you work in the Patent and Trademark Office, I don’t think I pay your salary - my clients do.
Okay, your clients pay my salary.