Monstro had mentioned in a previous thread, she is salaried, and I assume she meant Salary Exempt. So she doesn’t get overtime for working more than 40 hours. That sucks, Monstro, sorry. While it is probably a pipe dream in the US, how much better would your job be if it were salaried nonexempt? In Monstro’s case, it would mean she would be fairly compensated for the extra work she’d have to cover for her 40yo knocked up coworker when the coworker goes out on maternity leave. It would probably be a lot less of an inconvenience for her since she would know that while she would have more work to do, they would be compensating her for the time.
If you are single, like Monstro and I, this can have its upsides. No sick kids to worry about, lonely husbands, etc. If you have a practical way to use the money or time, it can be even better- some places let you convert the ‘overtime’ into extra vacation time that you can use later. I know for me as much as I like overtime, having time my employer is paying me to stay home is even better
But extra money is always good. So how much better would your job be if it were salaried nonexempt? Based on the alternatives, this seems like the best of both worlds- you are guaranteed 40 hours/week of pay, but if you work more, you get paid more vs just hourly (might end up working less than 40 hours) or salaried exempt (nothing extra for working extra, and most places take advantage of that fact).
Salary nonexempt is for jobs where it is assumed you are always going to be working 40+ hours. So from a payroll prespective, it is easier to do since people will only need timecards if they are putting in overtime (which might not be terribly common for some nonexempt jobs).
Hourly is for jobs where the hours might vary widely; maybe you are working 36 hours one week and 52 hours another. While you would think some jobs would guarantee 40 hours a week depending on the nature of the job not all of them do.
(Exempt = excluded from minimum wage and overtime regulations, etc.)
The biggest benefit of being an exempt employee is that no one cares about my comings and goings, really. I can show up twenty minutes late and take a forty minute lunch break, and as long as my boss hasn’t set up a spy cam in my office, he/she will never know (and likely wouldn’t care, even if they did).
I also don’t have to ask for permission if I need to take a week or two off from work. I don’t have to worry about having to find someone to cover my shift in case I need to bail out at the last minute. Everything’s pretty flexible.
I do have to submit a time card every two weeks, since I have to account for any leave I take.
If I have to work extra hours during the work week, I am allowed to subtract them from the rest of the days in the pay period. For instance, if I end up working ten hours one day, I can show up two hours late the next day (or leave two hours early).
Being able to get paid extra sure would be nice. But it’s not like what I have now doesn’t have its advantages. There are trade-offs to everything.
Makes sense, I suppose. Its just in that thread you mentioned how much of a bother it would be to cover for your co worker. And I know friends that are salary exempt where their employer takes full advantage of it; working 60 hour workweeks for effectively less per hour than what I make which I don’t think is terribly fair.
If a person has been assigned to a special project that requires extra work, they are eligible for “compensatory leave”, which translates into overtime pay. Shortly before I was hired back in '07, you could get compensatory leave without having to jump through too many hurdles. But then the economy crashed and the agency pocket book closed up. But technically it still exists. You just have to grovel in front of the Supreme Court to get it.
I’m retired now but when I was working I had several opportunities to take a promotion to the next higher level. But such a promotion would have moved me from a wages job to a salaried job - and with the routine overtime I was making, that would have been around a ten thousand dollar paycut. (And it wouldn’t have significantly reduced my hours either. The people in the salaried position were “encouraged” to work extra hours.)
I’m not understanding how this is related to my exempt status, though. Even if I did get overtime pay, I wouldn’t want to work more than eight hours a day for three months straight. Because I care about having leisure time more than money. And I don’t really care for this chick’s job duties.
I pulled extra shifts all the time back in my younger hairnet-wearing days. But that was because I wanted to earn extra cash, not because I was forced to due to labor shortages.
Similar to my job, where being a ‘manager’ means I would effectively make less per hour than what I am making now.
Sure, of course, but the money could go toward more leisure time activities or if they let you flex it you would effectively get more vay cay time down the line. You’d still be better of than you are now. Sorry!
I would get an extra 5 hours or so of pay per week. Not a huge deal, but definitely better than exempt.
Also, I don’t seem to have monstro’s benefit of nobody caring whether I show up a bit late. I’m a middle manager, in charge of a crew of 60 (give or take) people. The extra hour or so I spend every day is showing up before the hourly workers’ shift starts and updating the daily labor schedule to account for sick calls and last minute pop-up jobs, so it would definitely be a problem if I was late. It only takes about 15 minutes or so, which leaves time for coffee and a light breakfast before work. So now that I think about it, I guess I’d only get paid for an extra 15 minutes a day for actual work I do beyond 8 hours. Most days I get to leave at the same time as the hourly workers.
In California, there is a state-recognized job category called, I believe, Computer Professional. In the context of this thread, such a position could be a salaried position, but the worker must be paid for all hours worked at straight time (calculated as weekly salary divided by 40 hours). I believe this was written to protect all those programmer and system engineer types who were working 18 hour days and sleeping under their desks.
To qualify you have to be not a manager of any other people, and you have to spend more than 50% of your work time doing coding of some kind. Before I retired, my position had this classification, even though the coding I did was writing Crystal Reports and such like. I had been a manager of other people but due to downsizing I was left a manager without staff. At that point I got a nice bump in income due to this law; that is, until a new department head decided all my overtime had to be pre-approved, and it never happened any more.
I’ve always worked jobs where bosses were flexible with my salaried hours. Some weeks I work about 35, other weeks 42. Since I won’t work jobs where I need to work more than 40 consistently (I’ve had primary kid responsibilities for 17 years now), getting paid overtime wouldn’t exactly do much - give me a few paid hours here and there, but make it more likely my boss nickles and dimes me on the “leave early to pick up the kids.”
At some point trading time for money is no longer attractive. We reached it years ago. Even one and a half times the money. The time is worth far more to us. So we are semi-retired (right now,I have a real job for insurance and steady income, he consultants, last year he had the real job, I homeschooled our son). I could make about $30k more a year if I chose a different employer - but the one I have doesn’t put a lot of additional demands on my time - understanding that I’ve traded money for more time and being happy to have gotten someone of my caliber at below market rates.
One of the issues with the time for more money thing is that you end up spending more time when you have less of it. The house takes a little longer to clean because its messier. You have fewer choices about when to run to the grocery store because its busier. You arrive home a little more tired and it takes a little longer to switch into being truly relaxed. Forty five hours isn’t bad, fifty five is exhausting and stressful (for most people, there is a study somewhere) - but as someone said the extra money from forty five isn’t huge. And maybe when you’ve had more money than time, you’ve hired some of that - someone to walk the dog, clean the house, mow the lawn, more eating out because who has time to cook and you are hungry right after work. So that if you then take the extra money you made and trade it back for time, its often not really the same trade you thought you were getting.
I think this is a key difference. I am not a manager. If I had to supervise people, I wouldn’t have the flexibility in my schedule that I have now. I wouldn’t be able to work four-tens (I don’t now, but this is my choice) because the supervisor needs to be around just in case there are fires that need to be put out.
But my supervisor never hangs around past five o’clock, and he tends to come in around nine-ish–thirty minutes before he’s supposed to. So even he enjoys a flexible schedule. It’s just not as flexible as mine.
This. Exactly this. First of all, I’ll take my current salaried income level over my income in my earlier life when I was an hourly employee. Secondly, I’ll take the flexibility that being a salaried employee provides - I don’t punch a time clock, I don’t have to be “approved” for time-off, I don’t worry about a break or lunch schedule, and I don’t have to worry about covering someone’s shift when they’re taking time off. Yes, sometimes I work well over 40 hours a week. That comes with the responsibility of my job. Usually I only work 40 hours a week. Sometimes I work less than 40 hours a week I get the same paycheck on the 15th and last day of the month. It is up to me, as a professional to know when I need to put in the extra hours and do my job. I also value the minimal time-management oversight by senior management.
I do honestly find it incredibly amusing to see this example of an hourly employee somehow thinking us salaried folks are somehow being screwed over.
^This, exactly. I get the fact that at some companies the starting salary for management can be less than what an hourly employee makes with “normal” OT factored in, but I don’t get it. Most places where I’ve worked consider the OT that an employee currently receives when caluclating the new salary. The “Hey, here’s a promotion! It come with more responsibility AND pay cut!” approach just baffles me. Anyone who would take that deal probably doesn’t have enough common sense to be a manager!
Generally speaking, being salaried and exempt is a pretty great deal, IF you don’t routinely work over 40 hours a week. You get a paycheck of a guaranteed amount, you get a lot more flexibility in your time, along with nobody nitpicking whether you’re there at 8:00 or 8:08 am, nobody griping if you occasionally have a 2 hour lunch, and nobody griping that you skip out around 4 on Fridays. But… if there’s a system release and you have to put in 4 hours on Sunday morning, or some kind of system outage that requires you to be on the phone from 8 pm to 1 am some Tuesday night, so be it. You don’t get paid anything extra for that, but that’s the tradeoff in general. My job is pretty close to that ideal; we’re supposed to get approval for time off, but in practice, I’ve never had it denied in my 15 years in the workforce. Some places are crankier about being on time than others, and some are kind of pissy about time tracking; but even then it’s the accountants who are trying to estimate project costs who have their panties in a twist, not the actual managers.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work. However, there are people out there who are salaried and exempt who routinely work 50-80 hour weeks for not so much pay. For example, most associates at any law firm other than the very smallest and largest ones. Case in point- years ago I used to make about 55K per year and worked roughly 40 hour weeks. My wife was a senior associate at her law firm and made something like 85k per year. Thing was, when you considered the hours that she worked vs. the hours that I worked, our hourly rates were very close to equal. Her firm required her to BILL for 2000 hours annually, and that’s a middle of the road number- there are firms that literally require 2300 hours annually, and some require like 1600-1800. The big problem with billing 2000 hours a year is that if you take your two weeks of vacation (the remaining 80 to make it up to 2080 hours (a full year @ 40 hours a week), then you literally have to bill for 8 hours a day. So if you take a dump… that’s 10 minutes you can’t bill for. Chat with a co-worker for 20 minutes? That’s 20 minutes you have to stay late some evening. Lunch ran 30 minutes longer? That’s 30 more minutes you have to put in later. You have to spend an hour a week keeping your billing straight? That’s another hour you have to put in. The company does a full day of “team building” exercises? That’s a day’s worth of overtime you have to put in at some point.
There are a lot of tech places that have similar situations- maybe not billable hours, but the same sort of constant overtime. Make no mistake, there are employers that do take advantage of salaried employees, and having them be paid for straight time, would change their game drastically. Time and a half would be insane and likely unsupportable for their employers.
Good explanation, Bump. I have another angle that people tend not to realize:
I’ve been salaried exempt for a long time, and I’ve worked my way out of the places that work you to death and into a place that expects pretty routine 40-hour workweeks. So I’m good. But my job for the last decade or so has required occasional travel. I don’t get paid for my travel time. So if I fly on Sunday in order to be at the client’s site bright and fresh first thing Monday morning, that’s time out of my personal life that I’m not paid for. Generally that’s okay and just part of being a professional. But there was one time that really pissed me off.
My office was in Virginia and I had to go to a client’s site in Hawaii. (Yeah, nice… except I was there to work, not lay on the beach!) My return flight was Honolulu to Los Angeles and then to Virginia. The first leg was delayed for weather, so I missed the next flight out of Los Angeles. The best they could do for me was book me on another flight to Virginia that stopped in Denver. Either that or sleep in the airport and get the first flight in the morning, so I opted for the Denver-layover flight in the hopes I’d get home sooner. Long story short, it ended up being almost a 24-hour travel day where I left Honolulu at something like 10am and walked in my front door at 9am the following day. Unpaid. No comp time. Not even a hey thanks and sorry that happened to you from the boss.
My job requires occasional travel. When something like this happens, we are allowed to subtract time from the rest of the pay period (flex time). If the pay period is rapidly expiring, we can take it from the next pay period with boss’s approval. I’d be absolutely livid if I were denied this.
