If this law doesn’t pass, can the company do this now?
Regards,
Shodan
No, under current law, an employer cannot get a worker to put in time and then not pay him for it.
What’s your huge, international, private company? Unless it’s in one of a couple fields it’s not relevant to the type of employer we’ve been talking about in the rest of the thread.
Not quite. Hourly workers must be paid time and a half for any time over 40 hours a week.
AFAIK, they could make you work extra one day, and then send you home early within the same week, and not have to pay overtime so long as the total work hours in the same week don’t go above 40.
I missed this earlier. A very large company I worked at (started in a garage I might add), also did this in the nineties and I do remember several people being happy about the deal. My question is why does it need to be codified into law when it could be used to screw hourly workers? Why don’t they make it 1.5 hours of comp time for every hour of overtime? To me, giving 1:1 comp time for overtime is a interest free loan to the company on top of taking 33% of the employees legally guaranteed pay. If the employees want to take the deal, fine, but codifying it just give the company a way to screw the employees. If you really want to screw you employees with overtime pay, why not just make them exempt?
You’re incorrect. If I worked 8 hours over time, taking half in overime pay, and half in unpaid comp time, when I burn the comp time it’s true I’d not be paid for 4 hours that week, but because I got paid for 6 hours on the half I took in pay (4x1.5=6) I’d still be 2 hours up.
Our comp time could be banked to use when we needed extra time off, or we could cash it out if we needed extra money.
Comp time is a sweet deal IF it’s the employee who get’s to decide which they want.
Let’s say your pay rate is $10/hour.
If you work 8 hours overtime and take it all in overtime pay, you earn $120 cash.
If you take 4 of it at time and a half pay, and 4 as comp time, you earn $60 dollars cash and four hours leave that is valued at $10/hour. So you earn $100 dollars worth of “value”. You are losing money with this option.
If I got this wrong, explain to me using actual math how it works out different.
Maybe you mean you value time off more than cash, I dunno, but otherwise you’re either flat out wrong or you’re not explaining what you mean very clearly.
Duh. That’s the whole meaning of comp time.
My point is, if one splits the overtime between 1.5 pay and time off, when the unpaid time off is taken the pay period of under 40 hours will have been equaled out from the time one took in 1.5 pay. If one want’s the pay instead of the time, take it.
While your getting 12 hours off for working 8 hours over, the employer has to pay someone overtime during that 12 hours, which would be 18 hours pay. Some government agencies do this. Paying out 18 hours for 8 extra hours work is not a good value from the employers/taxpayers position.
While that’s possible, it’s unusual. I’ve never worked at a job, or even heard of a place, where the norm was to have someone work overtime when someone else was taking leave.
I am a nonexempt employee at a law firm. Personally, if I am asked to work overtime, generally I’d rather be paid for it. But one of my co-workers would generally rather have the comp time. Our boss (who also practices labor law) is of the opinion that he should not do that, even at the employee’s request - that he is required to pay overtime. (And generally he would rather have us work the overtime, and pay us for it, than take the comp time - we have more work than we know what to do with. In nearly 6 years working for him, I have never once known him to give anyone in our practice group a hard time about putting in for overtime. He knows that I would really rather go home, for example, than stay late to do new client intake, and I sure as hell didn’t want to stay until nearly midnight that one time to meet an asylum filing deadline.)
There must be a way to ensure that everyone’s interests are protected, including those of workers who would genuinely rather have the comp time, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what that is.
Employees already do have that choice. Let’s say an employee works Wed-Sun, but for some reason needs to cover a shift on Tuesday. Depending on their individual situation, they can either take the overtime or take a day off when they are scheduled but less needed. It’s already the employee’s choice, and the compensatory day comes in the same work week.
What the Republican proposal would do is tell employers that they can either pay overtime or give compensatory time off, and that compensatory time off can come whenever. And you can be sure it will come at a time of the employer’s choosing.
But how many people get enough overtime to make comp time worthwhile? My employers have a cow if someone goes into overtime. I did get about four hours of overtime last week due to a co-worker being sick but overtime is a rare thing for me anymore. Four hours of comp time? I don’t think so. I’d rather have the money.
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
That’s a good one.
Entirely reasonable and right…but I’ll bet ya big bucks that is not what the Repubs have in mind.
It’s actually a good idea. When the Democrats have an idea that doesn’t 100% hold water, Republicans pick at all the holes and make that the entire issue. Even if in the real world most of the problems with the Democratic idea will only affect a small number of people and on the whole the idea is good. Democrats do the same thing with a Republican idea. In my experience, most corporations follow labor laws because it’s better for them in the long run than to get caught not following labor laws. There have been many high profile cases in which corporations have had to pay back-judgments with treble penalties assessed on wages not paid in accordance with labor laws.
So a hole in this legislation, is even though as written it allows employees to either take comp time or pay, and if they can’t schedule the comp time during the year they get the pay by default, the fear is some employees who want/rely on overtime pay will be forced against their will through pressure by the employer to take comp pay instead, even though that’s against the law under this legislation. I think that would happen, but I think it’d happen relatively infrequently in the context of 140m or however many working people we have in this country. So I think for most people it would be a nice added bonus. There are definitely people who would rather take comp time some weeks instead of overtime.
Probably a smallish minority. It seems most common in 24 hr. critical services like police, firefighters, utility workers, air traffic controllers and the like. Frequently what happens is overtime is a little cheaper than staffing for internal coverage because you aren’t paying benefit packages. So staffs are cut and everybody works a bit more. My little work unit was cut by 40% and when those of us affected noted to management that that was going to cause a substantial rise in OT expenses to cover sick leave, vacations and such they said they were fully prepared and budgeted for that eventuality. Before that change I had worked one day of OT in 15 years, because I didn’t particularly care to miss days off.
I just finished working twenty days in a row this last weekend. Whadda ya gonna do :shrug:?
It’s common in manufacturing as well. Fluctuating demand for manufactured goods can often be cheaper to handle with overtime than large scale hiring. I know several factory workers who essentially get to choose at the beginning of each week whether to accept or reject scheduled overtime. Virtually no one at the factory ever rejects it, not because their employer will get mad (the people who do reject it generally face no real penalties) but because if you’re banking 10+ hours a week overtime and your base pay is $30/hour it starts to add up really, really fast.
To the rest of the thread, the legislation as written would allow up to 160 hours of comp time to be banked by the employee. The employee retains the right to cash it out at anytime, that isn’t subject to employer approval. We all know things don’t always work out that way, but in truth most of the companies that are regularly working people in enough overtime where this would even be relevant are big companies that are closely monitored and generally fairly well run on that regard. Refusal to pay out a comp time balance as cash would be a straight forward and terrible labor case for the company to lose.
In my experience the worst employer abuses happen at small businesses or business in the low end service and retail sector. By and large it’s not related to OT though, but various other things–most of the workers in those businesses would love to get 35 hours a week, it’s basically wholly outside the norm for them to even approach getting overtime on most normal weeks.
Here is the text of the House bill (HR 1406) It is not as bad as some might think.
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The bill DOES offer comp time at a rate of 1.5 hours accrued for each hour of overtime worked, removing the 33% bonus to employers that people here are suggesting.
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Employers must have written agreement with any employees who accept this form pf compensation, in which the employees agree that it is a voluntary arrangement and not a “condition of employment”. In the case of union shops, the unions must consent to it in a collective bargaining agreement.
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Employers must pay out annually in cash any accrued compensation time that has not been used within the last calendar year.
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At any time, an employee may request in writing to receive the cash value of the comp time, and the employer must pay it out within 30 days.
There is also a cap of 160 hours that can be accumulated. It doesn’t address what happens when an employee reaches that amount. Would all future overtime be paid at time and a half? Would the employee simply lose anything over 160 hours? I dunno.
Basically, AFAICT, this amounts to creating an overtime bank for employers and employees. The employers can defer overtime payment up to a year and use that money to their own benefit. Not quite as nice a bank for the employees, as there are more restrictions on how they withdraw their “deposits”.
I would have to say that reading the actual text of the bill removes most of my objections to it. My major remaining objection is that there is no assurance that the leave can be used at the convenience of the employee. However, that’s pretty much the same boat that annual vacation time is in.
Now, please tell me if or how I may have mis-read this, or what other implications am I missing?
Keep in mind that I work (now part-time, but retired from full time after 25 years in 2007). Some of our positions were essential, especially those that worked in the jail. If a deputy in the jail took comp time (or called in sick) somebody was getting tagged with overtime. Every position in the jail had to be filled, and some of them had to be with sworn staff, not C.O’s. . This wasn’t the same for those of us on patrol as they could get by with one or two calling in. But if enough used comp time or called in sick (or a combo of) on a single shift, someone was going to get tagged.
Don’t know, but it was always good for me. By working some overtime and on some holidays I managed to accrue 240 hours a year. Using the split method I posted earlier I still made extra money. This added 6 weeks off time to my days off, vacations, etc. every single year.
This could, in theory, work but only in situations where the workers were protected from employer pressure. Absent that, this is just a way for employers to get out of paying overtime.
There is one thing though that I think has been overlooked. Yes, there will be situations where employees will build up large amounts of comp time which they will be unable to use because their employers won’t offer them an opportunity to use it. That’ll be bad for the employees who get screwed for those unpaid hours. But it will also give the employee some protection. I have to assume the employee will have an entitlement in those hours. If the employer decides to downsize an employee who’s owed 200 hours of comp time, he’ll have to retroactively pay the employee for the time he’s owed. That knowledge might act as an incentive to keep somebody on the job.
True. I still don’t like the legislation, but if it actually passed it wouldn’t be some kind of atrocity against labor.