It depends on the state, other than some exceptions for certain industries like trucking, I don’t believe there are any federal restrictions on how many hours an employer can have you work. An hourly employee must receive overtime for anything over 40 hours of course, but that’s not applicable to salaried employees. But as another poster pointed out, studies have shown diminished returns for working more than 50 hours per week. People get fatigued, they make mistakes, and they’re just not performing to the best of their ability.
I was listening to Freakanomics the other day, and their guest pointed out that most CEO with MBAs don’t grow the business, they just cut costs and make more profit.
There are no federal labor laws for adults when it comes to things like hours and breaks, outside of a few specific jobs and wages (like if OT pay is required or exempt).
I disagree with that statement in general, recognising that some exceptions exist… The workers who get screwed over are generally in startups or small, under-capitalised businesses. Large corporations have policies and HR pros and all the rest, and tend to treat their employees pretty well.
Our office was closed a few years ago, and all the developers layed off. The large corporation I worked for gave everyone a severance of one month’s pay per year of service. They also provided job finding services, gave us thousands of dollars in retraining tuition, and let everyone on a defined benefit pension who was within a few years of retirement keep their benefits going between the layoff and retirement, which they didn’t have to do.
My company made all kinds of stupid management decisions, but I’ve never had a complaint about the way they treated employees. IMO, some employees with obvious issues were treated TOO well, getting kid glove treatments and numerous rounds of performance improvement management and shuffling around to find a ‘compatible’ team instead of being shown the door.
In contrast, I have worked for several small businesses, and they were awful. Always sweating the money, they tried to get you to do as much work for free as they could get away with, they underpaid while promising to ‘make it up’ in the future when the business took off, and you always had to worry about whether they would have money for your next paycheck.
One place I worked at, I sat in the sane room with the boss/owner at a 50-year old desk, doing ‘scientific programming’ which turned out to be building a customs database for his products. The worst was that if I stopped typing to think through an issue, he’d say “I don’t hear any typing. I pay you to work, not sit around daydreaming.” Sometimes I’d just type randomly so he’d hear the noise while I thought, then I’d delete what I typed when I was ready to write some actual code. It was miserable. I lasted a few months then got out. Lousy pay, too.
It’s the nature of the beast. Small businesses tend to be under-capitalised and ‘HR’ is run by the owner or a spouse who doesn’t really know what they are doing but see how much money is being paid out to employees, which is often more than they pay themselves. Some owners get resentful of that and start trying to maximise their ‘value’ by overworking employees or cut other expenses around employment.
Big corporations will do things like buy you an ergonomic chair if you need one because of back issues or something. Computers are refreshed on a regular basis. Small businesses? Good luck. You’re probably sitting on an old office chair they bought at auction when they were supplying the new office. The computer you are using might be a 5 year old machine with a ten year old monitor.
But I was my own boss, so that would’ve been a conversation I had with myself.
One of those two efforts is difficult. One is relatively easy. Which would you choose if all you cared about was bumping the stock price for a few quarters?
There are plenty of companies that have a “do extremely hardcore work or get out” mentality. Particularly in Silicon Valley tech firms. Why do you think they have all those employee perks? Out of some sense of generosity and altruism? They do it so their employees have fewer reasons to leave the office.
According to Glassdoor, engineers at Twitter can make $200k to $300k or more.
These are not 9 to 5 workaday jobs for people counting the days until retirement.
I’ve worked in those environments. Basically what Elon Musk wants are the sort of people who are totally bought into his vision / cult of personality and who don’t care about family / relationships / personal life.
I gather than this analogy was invented by somebody who flunked high school physics and chemistry. Those of us who passed those subjects may recall that you have to pump a considerable amount of additional energy into water after raising it to boiling temperature to get it to actually boil.
Everyone said he wanted most of the employees gone and this was a method to achieve that. Right now it looks like it worked.
Managers can authorize work at home when justified. If the justification doesn’t hold up the manager can be fired.
Although, really, at this point they have to be thinking, “screw it, at this rate none of us are going to have jobs because there ain’t gonna be a Twitter to have jobs in…”.
“I’m not going to worry about implementation details. I’m an ideas guy!”
Which actually makes it a perfect analogy for the situation @Ann_Hedonia described:
Well, Musk’s ultimatum didn’t work out very well.
Maybe the goal was too further reduce headcount?
Anyway, my favorite line from that article is:
Twitter, which has lost many of its communication team members, did not respond to a request for comment.
I can’t help but think most of those leaving said “to hell with this shit”. Who wants that level of uncertainty and drama? Particularity when they have skills they can sell to a different (and presumably more stable) employer?
I was never on Twitter, but I feel a pang of sadness for a company used by so many that has been destroyed in a fit of pique by a man-child. More, I feel sympathy for so many who are having their lives disrupted by a man-child.
“It’s a problem of motivation. Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime; so where’s the motivation?” - Peter Gibbons
Except he has no vision for Twitter 2.0. Like, theres nothing thrilling that you’d want to be part of.
Yeah. With Tesla and SpaceX, Musk successfully communicated a vision. It’s cool to work for those companies, and you might share their vision. And if America turns to electric cars, it we have cheap commercial satellites, you might think, “i was part of that” decades later.
Twitter was a pretty decent platform for some uses, but Musk is damaging a lot of its value (paid verification, breaking two factor authentication) and is not communicating an alternative vision that would inspire the employees.
It’s hard to think what other than “i desperately need to keep this job” would keep employees there. That basically means H1B employees, bad employees who will have trouble finding new jobs, and maybe some edge cases of people with a desperately ill spouse who don’t want to deal with a new insurance company or something. That’s not a recipe to retain a strong staff.
Probably up there with unicorns and mermaids. Possibly real, at some point in the distant past, but so rare as to be practically mythical.