Is there a systematic way that employee roles are determined to be salaried or paid-by-the-hour or is that kind of a judgement call on HRs part at that particular organization?
I realize the CEO is always salaried (plus bonuses!) and that call center CSRs or assembly workers in a factory are hourly … but what about the myriad roles in between?
If it matters, I’m heading for an internal move into a position that essentially needs to be created out of thin air at our corporation – think process documentation & knowledge management. I’d like to know before going into any potential negotiations about the role how that sort of determination is made.
My best advisor boiled it down to **internal vs. external support **(for ex. call center CSRs help outside customers, while the IT tech support guy helps other employees) but to me it feels like **measurable output or discrete production items **should be the deciding factor.
I dunno. This corporate thing isn’t very familiar territory for me, mostly because until very recently my direct supervisors have been dysfunctional leaders and set poor examples. I’m re-learning some of what I call The Corporate Dance from scratch like a teenager at her first “big girl” job, so forgive me if this is an odd or silly question.
What say you, Dopers? And I’ll hijack my own thread to say if anyone wants to throw learning material relevant to documenting process flows I’m happy to receive any resources.
How common is it for an hourly paid worker working 40hr weeks to have a higher annual income than salaried employee working similar hours? (Generally speaking)
I can’t say how common it is but it definitely happens. Some long-time hourly employees that I have worked with have refused promotions because it would be an overall pay cut (the expectations were lots of overtime for both but you don’t get overtime when you are salaried).
Even within the salaried ranks, pay isn’t determined strictly by job level or title. I have made more money than several of my bosses even when we were both salaried. It isn’t that unusual in technical jobs.
You have to look at the specifics of every job to know. There is the myth of a “career ladder” but it doesn’t really work that way. It is more like a career Jungle Gym.
To answer your specific question, it isn’t a judgement call for the company at all. It is dictated by national labor laws and companies can get into trouble for violating them (and have many times).
Without knowing anything else, “process documentation & knowledge management” sounds like a clearly salaried job to me if you are working for the company itself (other options are the various consultant and independent contractor classifications but you didn’t mention those). I am not a labor attorney nor a lawyer at all but I have worked in corporate American for a couple of decades including an HR consulting firm and that is the way that I interpret it.
This is what happened when my employer was sold last year. Many of our old managers (they’d been hourly with the old employer) stepped down to rank-and-file upon realizing that OT was not only expected, but was the norm for salaried managers with the new employer. We’ve since heard that 12-hour days for salaried managers are typically the norm since the new employer likes to cut rank-and-file payroll hours whenever possible. Oh, and no OT either unless there’s an extenuating circumstance.
Ok, first of all there are two different issues. Are you asking about the difference between salaried and hourly or the difference between exempt ( from FLSA) and non exempt? Although salaried is often exempt and hourly is often non-exempt, you can have a salaried non-exempt job and any job can be paid hourly. For example:
Hourly $10/hr
Salaried exempt $400/wk no matter how many hours you work
Salaried non-exempt- $400 wk for up to 40 hours, time and a half over 40.
Positions need to meet certain requirements to be exempt , but those requirements have nothing to do with internal or external support, or measurable output. The previous link has a good explanation http://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
It’s up to the company’s judgement in only one way - any job can be treated as non-exempt , even one that meets the requirements for exemption. It doesn’t work the other way around.
boiled it down to **internal vs. external support **(for ex. call center CSRs help outside customers, while the IT tech support guy helps other employees) but to me it feels like **measurable output or discrete production items **should be the deciding factor.