It’s not just a matter of what’s ethical, or fair. It also helps an economy enormously if the huge umber of people who make up the middle class have enough time to start new businesses and enterprises and the money to do so. Sure, there are talented and energetic people in the upper classes, who will do the same, but there are a LOT more people in the middle class, and they are the engine that can really make an economy roar. Conservatives and especially libertarians will often say it only the wealthy who are capable of achieving, or that achievers are achievers and will achieve no matter what their limitations.
Now anyone who buys the first assertion, I leave you to go live in the oligarchy you think is the ideal society. For those who buy the second assertion, I ask you: suppose you have two teams of runners. One team is wearing fat suits, is blindfolded, has cinderblocks chained to their ankles, etc. etc. The other team is dressed in sneakers and track suits. When you point out one team is much more likely to outrun the other, you are told that winners are winners and will win no matter what their limitations. Do you buy it?
No you do not, if you have any sense. But I have heard that assertion about achievers achieving no matter what on this very board on several occasions.
The reason you want workers’ hours limited and wages high is that you want your society to be rich and successful. Not just fair and just.
No, what they say is that by achieving they have a better chance of becoming wealthy.
The fact is, plenty of people work 9-5 jobs. They don’t get paid as much, but then why should they get paid as much as a lawyer or IT professional who works 80 hours a week?
You’re not addressing the central point of my argument. Two societies have middle class populations, fairly large ones. One society allows business to lengthen working hours and lower wages for its middle class, while allowing a lot of them to fall into poverty, losing their homes, their health insurance and their general ability to survive. Another society protects its middle class, ensuring they make good salaries, work reasonable hours that gives them free time, and have health care and housing even if poor. Which society will see more new business ventures, new ideas, new economic growth, in short, arising from innovations from members of its middle class?
Starting up new businesses usually requires exceptional demands on the employees and the owner. That has already been ruled out as part of the initial problem.
Fewer people will want to start their own business even if your second statement is true because they already have well paying jobs with stable and perfectly manageable demands. There is little reason to take big risks in society #2.
You can’t legislate a certain number of middle-class jobs into existence. As the costs for supporting those workers becomes greater, it increases pressure to offshore the work, spend money on additional automation, or even drop whole lines of business because they aren’t profitable given the labor costs involved.
When the whole story started, I was more or less in charge of development and support of two smallish business units, and one very small one. I’d got stellar reviews for the year that was just ending, and was told that once they figured out how to negotiate the byzantine HR maze to get me promoted, that they’d promote me. Times were great- I loved my job and actually looked forward to going in. I definitely didn’t get that Saturday night dread of going to work on Monday morning feeling.
What ended up happening was that the boss (good guy)left to go to a different company about a month later, and then for various reasons, they shitcanned his two managers (who were great) and a co-worker, leaving 3 of us.
Then the new guy was hired, and because I was acting as the backstop for one of the managers who was doing a bunch of technical stuff due to time constraints and lack of resources, I got tagged as “the technical guy.”
So I ended up going from what was basically a junior project manager role with a lot of responsibility and freedom, to a much less responsible, much more support and production task oriented role, which I’m not nearly so good at. I even explained this to the new guy who seemed kind of incredulous that I could do anything or want to do anything other than the technical stuff.
Combine that with a change in ownership in there somewhere, who promptly stuck their fingers into the compensation pie, and you have the recipe for a 1% raise and no promotion. I keep getting good reviews, and told I’m doing a good job, but it doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to pay or promotion time.
I’m fairly bitter about it, even though I realize that most of it was out of my control.
I’m with John Mace here. When you are a professional, salaried employee, a 40 hour week is not necessarily standard. If you mandated that it was so, you would simply see base salaries decline across the board.
For example: Biglaw lawyers the first year out of law school get paid $160k/yr, but are expected to work 80-100 hours per week. The system is just set up that way. Now pass a law saying that they must be paid overtime beyond 40. Okay, base salary just became $75/yr with 80-100 hours expected and overtime paid.
Now, I do agree with some posts where the employer tells you the job is 50 hours a week and it turns out to be 70, he misled you. AFAIK, that is contractual fraud (you did get that in writing, no) and you can get damages from him.
The idea, though, is that an exempt employee has some marketable skills that can’t easily be replaced. A company screws over enough good people they go out of business. Fast food cooks, on the other hand, are paid hourly and get overtime because they are a dime a dozen and need government protection.
Do the research in your industry and make sure you know what is expected of you before you pursue a career. Forty hours per week is NOT standard for a professional.
So what do we do to stop employers from designating all of their workers as salaried and requiring that everyone work 40 extra hours, unpaid, and firing those who refuse and replacing them with other desperate workers?
I don’t have a cite in front of me, but U.S. Federal Law does a pretty good job of defining it. In addition to listing certain professions it talks of the value being in your knowledge and not in the time that you put in. It also exempts managers, but puts some teeth in it and requires that you actually have supervisory or disciplinary authority over people, so McDonald’s can’t just make you the “French Fry Manager” and call you exempt. I actually have not seen this law abused, if any..
Sure, you’d see on-paper salaries decrease, but effective salaries would remain exactly the same, just as you’ve stated below. This is otherwise known as “making salary information more accurate, by letting people know the true value of an hour of their labor and their employer’s actual currently-unwritten expectations.”
Which is, to my way of thinking, a significantly better result.
Frankly, one of the goals I’d have in any new regulation concerning working hours is that all employment will have contractual terms like this. I don’t care what you think it makes me, I believe there should be some protections for people who want to work hard and do a good job but don’t want to spend their entire lives at work–I don’t think it is ethical for an employer to fire a good, productive-per-hour employee merely because they won’t work unpaid overtime, and yet we see this happening all the time in some industries.
Certainly it is, at least in any field that touches any government–we are mandated at my company in every DoD contract we take that people who touch contracts work exactly 40 hours per week, and we’re penalized pretty harshly if ANYONE works overtime. Like it or not, the standard expectation of the standard American is that their job will average 2080 hours a year, over a career if nothing else.
According to basic economic theory and historical precedent? The first one will see more new business ventures and economic growth. They will have more incentives to start new businesses. They will have more disposable income because taxes will be lower. They will have less regulatory restraints peventing them from working longer and harder to get their product out the door.
If you have 4 employees working 50 hours, you can cut back to 40 and hire a new employee. You will not have to pay overtime. You will not suffer the drop off in work quality from workers extended hours.
This works in cases where you have incredibly steady demand for your employees’ work product, but in many industries there are structural, seasonal or otherwise cyclical factors that lead to really busy weeks as well as weeks where there’s little or nothing to be done. In such instances, it seems entirely reasonable to have four employees versus five.
Certainly, but most of the industries being specifically complained about (IT, law, etc), there is no real cyclical nature of the job, but the overwork appears to be part and parcel of the job year-round.
The part you are missing is that people volunteer to do it myself included. You don’t just land in an IT job above the level of a Tier 1 help desk or entry level programmer without years of planning and training. Both of those fields have lucrative positions that some people want to work towards and the reasons that are nobody else’s business. Both of those fields also see excessive demands for unequal compensation sometimes too but that is because they are talent driven and want people to get out if they can’t make it to a better position. The general term for that is ‘competitive’ and it applies in fields as diverse as real estate and research science. Competitive fields require talent churn voluntarily or involuntarily to do what they do. Can’t some of you see why having a steady workload mandated by the government could be a bad thing in a competitive field? It would be like having a car race with the no passing flag flown from start to finish.
Not all jobs are like that. If you don’t want to be competitive, stay out of the fields that depend on it.
I am an IT director, who has demanded and worked 40 hour weeks for my entire career from day one as junior assistant Unix admin, except for one startup that promised me greater rewards than a standard salary. When those rewards didn’t materialize, I left and the company fell to pieces literally within two weeks. Your statement is not true in all cases–I rarely ever see it true, actually. Most of the grunts I know who work 60-80 hour weeks stay grunts, because their companies like exploiting their labor and have a shitty business model that requires them to get extra unpaid workers to stay afloat. Most of the guys I know who got jobs at companies with sensible hours got regular raises and promotions, because good companies don’t need to have unpaid overtime.
The problem arises in a few fields (law, programming, medicine etc) where there’s a cultural situation where nearly all employers are expecting everyone to work vast amounts of overtime, and the law for whatever reason has decided to legitimize that.
Besides, I’m not for mandating 40-hour weeks. I take the sensible position (that DoD takes in contracting as well) that 40-hour weeks are the current US standard, and that salaried personnel shouldn’t be expected to work more hours than that on average.
I misspoke in my earlier post. DoD actually enforces hours-per-month, not per-week, based on the number of workdays in a month.
Short version of my stance: my labor is valuable, and my employer can compensate me for it or I can walk.
I don’t care if YOU have to or want to work extra hours to make yourself look good, but if you’re being forced to do so and not being compensated for it, that’s bullshit and your employer needs to be crushed.
Okay, so we have Federal law that defines who is exempt and who’s not.
What’s to stop me from making my 5 salaried programmers work six 16 hour shifts, 40 unpaid, under the threat of replacing them with 500 more applicants willing to accept those working conditions? What’s to stop my competitors from seeing me do this and following suit?
Eventually we’ll weed out the “lazy dirtbags” (being satirical here) who can’t work 16 hour days 6 days a week and replace them with humans who have evolved the ability to put off a good night’s sleep until Sunday. Oh yeah and did I also mention that in this perpetual employer’s market economy, I could pay these poor schmucks minimum wage and by working them 8 extra hours I’d cut my labor costs in half… to 4 an hour? King Ko-er, India got nothin’ on me!!!
I’m not sure what the laws are on this either, but this suggests that you could make minor alterations to your employees’ work descriptions and then require your salaried staff to work 20 hours a day for 7 days straight!
Oh and good luck suing me. Because 1) I can make this a public shitstorm and you’ll never get a job again because employers hate hiring workers who sue; and 2) the state and Federal labor boards ain’t exactly viper-fast about getting to all of these cases. Bad PR? Fines? Bah. Which do you think Americans will remember more? That or the next Housewives of Joisey Shore catfight?
I am with you. But you can have some fun taking that attitude in job interviews.
I interviewed at a date center, for a maintenance job. From the first part of the interview I gathered that they were having trouble finding a qualifed canidates.
2nd part of interview tour of the plant, what a mess. Cold air blowing in the on the servers discharge side and return on the server inlet side, backwards. They placed move and cools to help with the cooling, condenser discharge from them going back into the air condition spaces. Large fans set up to blow the air around to help.
3rd part of the interview with manager explaining that the job would require me to be on call 24/7 52 weeks a year. I do not think they were planning on paying any on call time only for hours worked. They kept asking me if lI would have a problem with being on call. I kept saying not if I was properly compensated for being on call. Finally I was asked what do you mean by properly compenstated? My answer was along the lines that in my profession on call pay is normally half time pay for all hours on call, time and half for all hours worked outside of normal hours, and 4 hours minumn OT pay for any call backs.
They probably found some smuck to take the job. Employeers do get what they pay for and when they don’t pay it can cost them. After looking at the plant I knew I did not want to work there unless they really made it worth it for me and I doubeted they would.
:eek: