I’d actually lose money if I went to salary. Luckily, I’m the highest paid hourly worker in my office. During busy times, I love the time and 1/2 and double time that I get. I’d actually have to jump two postions to make more salaried than hourly.
True, there might be a bit more prestige if I had my boss’ job. But, I don’t want to spend as much time as she does in bullshit meetings.
I started out as an hourly employee in my first programming job after college. It worked out well for me. We had a couple of big projects that were so critical that my boss basically told me: “Work as much OT as you need to to get the job done.” So, I did. I almost always volunteered to stay late, or take on a bit of extra work so a salaried person could leave at a sane hour. Towards the implementation phase of the project, I was working 65-70 hours in 4 days. (I’d just take Fridays off because there was nothing happening on Fridays and I needed my sleep). The hours were insane, but the paychecks were very nice, nearly a month’s regular pay every two weeks.
Right after that project ended, I got promoted and became exempt. The good news was that I got a 7% raise to go with it. The bad news was that in terms of real money it amounted to about a 12% pay cut, since I would no longer get paid for overtime. The thing is, once I stopped getting paid for overtime, I stopped volunteering to work extra hours. My sleep schedule returned to normal, my social life picked back up (well, as much as my social life has ever been ‘up’). I get to spend afternoons and evenings doing things I want to do, rather then slaving away at work with visions of dollar signs in my head.
I have no complaints about either situation. The extra OT my first 14 months on the job allowed me to save up about $8,000 which ended up being about 75% of my house downpayment. Being salaried means I don’t have to worry about getting to work 10 minutes late or leaving an hour early for a doctor’s appointment.
I don’t think I’d want to go back to being hourly at this point in my life, but at the time it worked out great for me.
Advantages: Hour-and-a-half lunch breaks, whenever you want. Being sick for 2 days in a row and not noticing a change in the paycheck. Leaving 15 minutes early everyday to beat the traffic.
Disadvantages: That horrible feeling you get after telling the boss you couldn’t possible stay late tonight because of (insert lame excuse here) and bolting for the door.
Salary is a state of mind. Hope to achieve it! 
I work for a state government and this is not true in my case, so I’m curious if you have a cite. If I don’t work at least 8 hours in a day, the difference has to come from personal leave or sick time, or I don’t get paid.
My nephew said he was transferred from the drive-up lane to overseeing the salad bar. I asked him if that was good, and he said, “Oh, yeah! I’m on celery, now.”
Well, my cite is irs.gov, but I’m not willing to look up the exact page. I believe the rules are different for private sector vs. public, though, and that would explain your situation.
I’m interested in a cite as well. I looked through irs.gov, and couldn’t find anything that backs up your claim. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I sure can’t find it.
Sorry, wrong government department. Dept. of Labor is where I meant to send you (I got there through a link on irs.gov, hence my goof).
The document will probably put you to sleep. The gist of it is, if you are docked for working less than a full day, you aren’t actually salaried - you’re hourly/non-exempt. There are a lot of qualifications you must meet (in your pay, job duties, level of authority & accountability, etc.) before you can be classified salaried/exempt.
I, too am a salaried government employee and brought this issue up with my union. Their response was
which I eventually did find on the Dept of Labor website, but it wasn’t easy.
It’s 29 C.F.R. §541.710 and can be found here http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html
IIRC correctly from my Management course – originally, it was a something of a honour to be considered as “exempt”. Blue collared workers and managers are considered as “exempt”, which seperates the from the rest who are paid by hourly.
However, recently, some companies have been known to push exempt employees far beyond than what they are paid off, and denying them OT at the same time. There were a couple of case studies in my textbook regarding this – I dig it out from storage if anyone is interested.
Here in Australia a salaried position is really just a contract of employment - “We will pay you X and you will work whatever hours are required to fulfil the requirements of the position”. Everyone I know that has acquired a salaried position has been worse off than working for a set wage with overtime, on call allowances and other benefits. It is particularly true in the IT and accounting fields - people leave for 20% pay rises and find, after a short heneymoon period, that they are expected to work 60 - 70 hours a week. Hell, we laugh when they come back complaining, looking for their old job back.
I looked this up due to having a co-worker who is salaried and a complete and total slacking scammer. I don’t mind when you screw my boss, but this guy screws the whole department…
The law on this matter, which is probably not followed to the letter at most employers, is that if you work more than a half day as a salaried employee then you worked a whole day and may not have that time counted against you.
If you work half a day, you can have the half day count against your vacation/sick allowance as is appropriate.
As to what happens when you work a quarter day, I couldn’t figure out. The law may not speak to that… the answer could be in case law, and I don’t have Lexis/Nexis handy, so googling it out would be darned tricky.
Oh, and at my job the only difference between being salaried and exempt is just the difference between being salaried and exempt.
We have 3,000 mobile electronics repair techs working hourly, with most everyone else except for their dispatchers on salary. They get the same benefits as the rest of the company, same sick, same retirement, everything.
A number of the other menial jobs are outsourced entirely… the guys mailing hard drives out to the repair techs all come from a temp agency.
I’m at a Fortune 1000 firm.
YaWanna, excellent explanations.
Exempt/non-exempt status was discussed at a meeting I attended this week, for muncipal leaders (city council members, mayors).
At the last place I worked, exempt employees were often treated as non-exempt, and we didn’t know that this was a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
One of the panel members (an attorney) warned us about allowing non-exempts to work overtime (over 40 hours in the work week). If someone takes lunch at their desk and answers the phone, it can be considered OT. If someone comes in a half hour early and turns on their computer and starts reading e-mail, it’s OT.
He said the penalty for not paying the OT is double the OT pay owed, and the employee can go back two years. He also said that the Labor Board will accept what the employee says they worked, unless the employer has kept records to the contrary.
He said that if you tell an exempt employee that he has to make up the two hours that he took off for a dental appointment, you’re treating him as non-exempt and you’ll be subject to paying him OT.
I think exempt status is an invitation to employer abuse. Who gets exempt status? Employees who work hard and put in a lot of hours. It’ll be cheaper to make them exempt and stop paying the OT, because employers know that the employee will keep working the same hours, or more, to justify the employer’s confidence in them.
New exempt employees feel guilty about coming in “late” or “leaving early”, even if the job is done, and they think working weekends without pay impresses the boss and puts them in line for bonuses or raises that might never happen.
When I went from hourly to salaried, I got a huge raise (30%) and better benefits, but later on I went for five years without a raise, while the cost of my benefits steadily increased.
Salaried employeese who left weren’t replaced – their duties were just given to others. Since being salaried means you’re paid for the job rather than the hours, you can end up much overworked and underpaid. There were almost as many cars in the parking lot on weekends as during the week. 
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I work as a research technician in a lab. I’m technically a non-exempt hourly employee, I think; I have to fill out a time sheet and everything. But according to HR, I can’t claim overtime unless it’s pre-approved by my supervisor, and my supervisor won’t approve overtime because it’s too complicated <cough>expensive<cough>. So instead I should just make it come out to 40 hours a week. I’m getting hosed, right?
If you’re working more than 40 hours a week and not being paid OT, then I think you’re being hosed.
If you’re not allowed to work more than 40 hours a week because the employer doesn’t want to pay the OT or your supervisor doesn’t want to mess with the extra paperwork – you’re not being hosed.
At least that’s my understanding.
For me being on salary means I don’t have to worry if my company has no work for me for a week.
I guess I am lucky in that, as a pilot, there are rules stipulating that I can fly a maximum of 900 hours a year. With an average flight time of 6.5 hours and generally 3 hours per flight for pre and post flight duties it means that I can work an average of about 29 hours per week. Because the 900 hours is a maximum limit it is rare that I actually get close to it (it is hard to roster people when they are close to their flying limits) and so probably do an average of about 24 hours per week. Sometimes I can go a week or more without doing any work at all, if I was getting paid hourly it would be very difficult to budget.
The hourly limits are about to go in our company as they introduce a new system which is based on fatigue levels. The sleep centre scientists say that fatigue is only influenced by the last seven days work so all of our limits will be based on much shorter time periods. The 900 hours will remain but it will become a negotiated part of our collective contract rather than a legal requirement.
Could they fire you once you hit the 900 and use someone else for the balance of the year?
Well, first off, you can’t be fired in Australia without a good reason. You would have to have made some kind of serious breach of company protocol.
Second, the cost and time taken to train someone else in the job would make it uneconomic to do this. The direct cost of puting one pilot through the simulator is around $14,000. That is only the cost of hiring the simulator and doesn’t include accomodation, the new pilot’s salary, the training and checking pilot’s salary or the indirect costs of having to have other pilots cover for the training and checking pilot’s own line flying. Not to mention that a significant proportion of new pilots never make it through the training process. From the most recent intake, none made it through (that was unusual, there is normally something like a 20% failure rate.)
Also there are other limits that apply such as 100 hours in a month. If they got their rostering sorted out and could get 100 hours out of you every month you’d be left with 3 months without flying. 6 weeks of that is annual leave, so there’d only be 1.5 months where you did nothing. They could make you redundant (doesn’t require a cause the way firing does) but then they have to pay you out 4 weeks pay in compensation so they’re left with 2 weeks out of the year where they didn’t have to pay you any money. Compared to $14,000 direct cost to train someone else, definitely not a viable option.
As I said, in practice they rarely roster you to the limits anyway so it is not like everyone works for only 9 months and then has the rest of the year off, the flying is spread evenly over the year and is usually around 700-800 hours.