How many people have job skills so valuable that they can quit at any time and know they will be able to get another job without any difficulty? I doubt it’s as high as one in a thousand.
But it’s one of the ways companies love to get their employees to agree to bad deals. Tell them they’re better than the other employees and the company would love to give them special benefits. But that darn union and those dang labor laws force the company to treat everyone the same. So a great guy like you gets treated like he’s just another worker drone. Hey, why don’t you sign right here and liberate yourself from all those laws and union contracts that are holding you down? Then we can shower you with all the rewards you deserve!
Wake up. Unless you’re an elf working for Santa Claus, your employer is not looking for ways to give you something for free. Your company is looking out for its own interests not yours. You should never put yourself into a position where you have to just trust that the company will give you what you deserve. Your company will only give you what it has to and if you make it possible for them to give you less, they will.
What sort of jobs are we talking about here? Because I sort of feel like unless you work for a tech company, Wall Street investment bank, law firm of Big-4 accounting/consulting firm, how many professional people are really working 60 hours a week or more? I’ve worked at those companies and all the regular “industry” clients we worked for always seemed like they went home at 5.
And what do you do for 15 hours a day anyway? Unless I was writing code for some unrealistic deadline, I feel like it’s rare that I would have 15 hours of actual “work” to do.
Walmart has been sued over this. People who were designated as assistant managers were exempt. Hourly employees doing things like checking customers out or stocking shelves were sent home when they hit their forty hours and the assistant managers were told they had to take over those job. They were also told they had to come in on their days off to cover these jobs.
Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar follow similar practices. They appoint an employee as a “manager” and put them on a salary. They then require them to work far beyond forty hours a week. Many often work seventy hours a week - with no additional pay.
The salary threshold for these jobs was $23,660 a year until 2016. Obama issued an executive order raising that to $47,476.
there is a limit to what people can do - and the company’s “performance” is going to be affected by high turnover when people are over worked.
this whole 50, 60, 70 hours a week is stupid. nobody is productive at those hours.
but in order for a company to realize that healthy/rested employees are better they have to have a long term view.
instead of, whatever is cheapest for the short term.
I’m gonna go kindergarten here; what excatly is an “exempt” eployee?
I’m not shitting you. Since going from the Air Force to a ‘normal’ position, I don’t know any difference between jetting the job done and alternate Fridays off. I just get work done when it needs to get done.
Basically, exempt from overtime pay rules. U.S. labor law requires employees to be paid X amount per hour over 40 hours a week, etc. Certain management positions are “exempt” from this requirement.
That’s why “exempt” is generally treated as a synonym for “salaried.” A salaried employee gets a fixed amount, regardless of the number of hours. “Non-exempt” or “hourly” employees are protected by the hourly wage laws.
Generally, “wage” is used to mean pay based on hours worked, and “salary” is used to mean a flat paycheck regardless of hours.
ETA: ninja’d by Acsenray’s fine post. But I’ll leave my cite:
See Handy Reference Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act | U.S. Department of Labor.
The key point being that under US labor law, almost everybody should be paid hourly, not a salary. It’s only because generations of business owners/managers have worked hard to stretch the meaning of the fixed terms in the law that we find ourselves with many workers being salaried.
Well, one of the advantages of being exempt is that (under most State and Federal definitions of the term), you only need to show up for work once a day. I’ve been involved in several labor actions and the opinions have always come down to, “Did he/she show up for part of a day?” If you did, no requirement for taking PTO or leave if you vamoose. Seriously. I had an “exempt” co-worker who was told by the company that he had to take PTO when he left work after lunch. The State said that he was present (for a few hours) on the scheduled work day and couldn’t be compelled to take it as a personal day even if he only stayed for an hour or so.
I’m not saying it’s fair, but this has been a pretty consistent opinion from the various labor boards and regulatory agencies.
My wife looked at my previous post and said I was not being specific. So here are some personal details about my experiences:
I took a three-week vacation (Barcelona, Cyprus, Paris) several years ago. Before leaving, I agreed that I had only 5 days of PTO accumulated and that I would take the remaining days as excused, but unpaid, leave. However, during my trip I received e-mails and text messages about business matters. I responded with e-mails and with phone calls to clients and my employer on at least 10 of my vacation days (though the response was very short…probably less than 30 minutes). When I got back, I claimed my salary for those 10 days for which I was originally not going to be paid. The State DOL came back very forcefully, saying, “He worked for you on these days? You have to pay him. Doesn’t matter how much he did or how long it took. He was working.”
One of the practices that was documented in the Walmart lawsuit I mentioned above was that the exempt employees were locked inside rooms to prevent them from leaving without permission.
You have to recognize the difference between working for a tech company or a law firm and working for a dollar store. The former might care about the quality of your work. At the latter you’ll be told “You can leave when this truck is unloaded.” There’s not a lot of concern over the quality of the work.
Do an adequate job and you’ll be able to do it again tomorrow. Do a noticeably bad job, or just walk away and quit, and you’ll be replaced by somebody else tomorrow. How hard is it to fill a job with no qualifications in an area with 15% unemployment?
I’m not in the US and we don’t have this whole “exempt” thing in Australia, your hours of work and pay is whatever you’ve agreed to in your contract provided it meets some minimum standards. That said, my situation is very similar to your salaried non-exempt scenario. I have an overtime threshold above which I get paid overtime. Below that I get my salary, even if I do 0 hours in a week for some reason. I also get overtime rates if I can be coaxed in to working on a day off. I am welcome to say “no” though. In previous jobs I’ve been paid a straight salary with no overtime, but there were contractual and legal rules about how many hours I could work. I’ve also been paid per day rather than per hour. I like the present situation the best.
I was a public employee. Which, for those unfamiliar with American terms, means I worked for the government (in my case New York state). I had a forty hour a week schedule. I had defined paid leave. I was paid overtime if I worked more than forty hours a week. I also was paid overtime or received compensatory time off if I worked on a holiday. Supposedly nobody could work more than sixteen hours in a row but there were some loopholes on that. When there was a need for somebody to work overtime, it would be done on a volunteer basis. But if nobody volunteered, you could be ordered to work the overtime. You could also be ordered to work overtime if there was a situation where some job had to be done by you specifically.
There were several years where I worked as a salaried employee and had to fill in timesheets weekly. God, what a pain in the ass that was. The timesheets were necessary not so I got paid but to satisfy audit requirements for some R&D tax credit my employer was receiving; they only got the credit for work that was done on what was considered genuine R&D effort on new products.
