For years, I’ve been a contractor working through an agency. Thus, I was a non exempt employee. I could get overtime, but I never had to, and I’d have to pass it by my supervisor anyway.
Now I’m contracting directly to a company, so I’m exempt now, and I’d forgotten how nice it is not to have to fill out time sheets and account for every hour of work I’m giving. To an extent, I’m… trusted, which is kind of freeing.
Hopefully they convert me to permanent, because it’s one of many things I could get really used to here…
Congrats. Getting what you want is an unbeatable feeling.
Do what it takes to ensure that “exempt” doesn’t become “60 hours of work for 40 hours of pay.” That’s 100% of my decade-plus experience with being an exempt employee. Good riddance to that crap; I’m hourly now and love never, not once, ever working for free.
Congratulations! But don’t over-estimate the value of “exempt”. I’m exempt, but I work at a defense contractor bound by US DoD contract law, which means that I have to account for every hour of labor under a specific charge line associated with a specific part of the Work Breakdown (which is known and approved by the contracting agency). And it’s audited.
So yeah, I fill in timecards in mind-numbing detail, although I’m white-collar monthly-salary “exempt”.
Pretty much. The terms come from US Federal labor law about maximum working hours, overtime pay, etc. People who are salaried are classified under that law as “exempt” from all those [del]good things[/del] onerous job-killing regulations.
Only certain occupational categories can be exempt. But over the years the interpretation of the magic terms has stretched from applying to very few people to applying to darn near everyone.
Which is why darn near everyone in the US who’s a full time worker works 60 hours of work for 40 hours of pay.
Tell me about it. On my last job someone was fired for asking if he could work four 10-hour days. The reason the mill manager gave for the firing? “If he’s not already working five 10 hour days he’s fucking me.”
Years ago, when my boss quit, I had to fill in for him until they found a replacement. Since I didn’t have the degree required to hold the position, they came up with a bull shit title for me and let me do the job.
Eventually, they broke down and formally offered me the job. Which meant I would go from non-exempt to exempt. When I saw what they were offering compared to what I was making, I kindly refused their offer.
Not sure why they thought I would take a job working the same amount of hours for thousands of dollars less per year.
BTW, I took them four frick’n years to find a replacement!
I turned down several attempts to “promote” me into an exempt position. Why would anybody want a job like that?
The only reason to move out a wage position is if you’re offered a partnership. Either get paid for the amount of work you’re doing or get a share of the company’s profits. Never agree to take a fixed amount of money for an unfixed amount of work.
The OP is a contract employee. Perhaps a better way to frame this would be to offer wishes that he receive a job offer for a permanent position, exempt or non-exempt, whichever way the cards may fall. Contract work has its good points, but a permanent job does as well.
Just a nitpick, but salaried and exempt are not synonymous. I was at one time a salaried non-exempt employee. It meant that I was responsible for accounting for my time and was assumed to have worked 40 hours, but if I did work overtime, I got paid overtime.
There may be more room at the top if you’re exempt. You might be in a better raise pool. And some companies don’t screw exempt employees, while some do.
As I recall, you were in the public sector. Things work differently in the private world, where there is tremendous variability in the compensation, expectations, benefits, and culture for exempt employees.
But I think the general principle is clear. If you have an employee who gets a fixed amount of money regardless of how much work they do, you have every incentive to have them do as much work as you can get out of them. In fact, you almost have a responsibility to do so.
Say you’re a manager at your company. Your job is to do what’s best for the company. If the company had an employee who was supposed to work eight hours each day but you let them go home after six hours, would you be doing your job properly? Most people would say no. Now suppose the company has an employee who gets paid a fixed amount regardless of how many hours he works. If you let him go home after eight hours when you have every right to insist he works for ten hours, how is it any different from the first example? In both cases, you’re effectively stealing ten hours of that employee’s labor each week that the company paid him for. It’s no different than stealing any other asset the company paid for.
That’s how the free market works. A company that can get fifty hours a week out of its employees for the same cost that they would pay for forty hours of work is more efficient and will outperform companies that stick to the forty hour week.
And don’t tell me this isn’t realistic. Companies used to routinely tell their employees to work fifteen or sixteen hours a day. And several people here have said that being required to work past forty hours is normal. As more people agree to it, you can bet the hours will increase.
Yes, I should have obviously noted that your reaction on this will vary greatly depending on company culture and past experience with overtime.
Mine has been good so far, as I said at the beginning, and I don’t anticipate doing a lot of it at this job. I just impulsively thought it was nice not to have to fill out time cards and have to think about where to squeeze in an extra half hour later in the week if my lunch ran long, or if I had to count it at all if it was with coworkers.
Apparently that makes me naïve. Oh, well, I guess experience will have to teach me.
In my professional life I’ve always been salaried/exempt, but have still had to fill out a timesheet. My first job was with a nonprofit where the projects I worked on were paid for with grant money, so time spent on each project had to be meticulously accounted for. My current job is much the same except now I am working for a government contractor.
I’m also salaried but most of my time is directly billable to a specific client. I enjoy some peace of mind from having to account for my time so it can be billed to the appropriate project. Obviously there’s more to job security but it’s definitely nice seeing on a weekly basis that you’re a profitable employee.
“What’s best for the company” is complicated. My company once took over another company’s multi-year contract because of “failure to execute”. They had a new manager try to squeeze too many extra hours out of their key employees (I’m sure there were other complaints, but that’s the one I heard). All but one walked (and then mostly recruited into my company) and replacements couldn’t be found fast enough. Bye-bye contract. Some penny-wise but pound-foolish managers get their come-uppance sooner than others.
