I understand the rules for determining who is “exempt” and who is “non-exempt”, as well as the labor regulations applying to both, but I’ve never been able to find an explanation for why some employees are exempted from overtime pay. Is is because their work is not easily measured in terms of time spent? Is it because more highly skilled workers theoretically have more control over their work hours and can thus more esaily resist unreasonable overtime demands? Is it just another reason to hate management?
The rules are in place to protect the little guy.
Government regulations make it so a corp can’t pay an assembly line worker a straight salary, then demand he work extra hours with no pay.
depends. the rationale we had in our agency was that certain people were ‘professional’ employees, as opposed to the hourly workers.
The professional employees had responsabilities that went beyond the actual shift hours (ie, were on call for problems, were responsable for insuring that everything ran smoothly even if they weren’t there). They were paid a salary (tho for accounting purposes, it translated to an hourly rate), if they worked more hours in a week, ‘compensatory time off’ (comp time) was given - ie, you had to stay 2 hours over, you’d work 3.5 hours less next week), not overtime pay.
(this was a unionized contract by the way)