Slashdot Mirror
New Overtime Rules Have Short Shelf Life
rwiedower writes "So the House just voted to scrap the new overtime rules that went into effect August 23. The vote was 223-193. Were the new rules designed to shaft IT workers from getting overtime? Or were they merely designed to streamline outdated rules?"
It happened in Ontario in 2002, they took away IT professionals ability to get overtime and other exceptions and nobody seemed to have cared :(
If anyone is in Ontario, is a geek, and in IT we must repeal the 2002 regulations putting IT into slave labour jobs!
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
I usually hate unions, but tech workers are one of those places where push has gone way past coming to shove. IT workers have been abused terribly for a very long time and we can only take so much abuse before we get fed up. So long as the membership isn't compulsory, the union sticks to JUST negotiating labor contracts and the workers keep a sharp eye on both the company AND the union, it just might work.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I think most technology workers (myself included) are much too individualistic to ever see much benefit it unionizing. Most of us would rather negotiate on our own terms without letting a middle man in on the deal. Many of us have witnessed the other downsides of unions as well.
Pricing themselves out of jobs.
Promoting mediocrity.
Antagonising non-union workers / coercing people into joing.
Attracting organised crime.
(waiting for the pro-union flames)
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
What benefits would employer-hostile unions provide when our jobs can be easily shipped over seas? Manufacturing plants are much harder to move than IT call-centers and programming teams.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
The 223-193 vote in favor of blocking the rules defied the White House. A threatened veto applied to veto a massive spending bill, now on the House floor, if it contains any language tampering with the rules that took effect Aug. 23.
am i the only one who thinks this is worded very strangely....cant really understand what it is saying. bush is threatening to veto a veto? they are vetoing a veto? or there is only one veto?
real confused on that one.
Depends on the union.
Unions are all about politics like anything else. My father has served as a district president for his union as well as grievance officer, both for several years.
He is one of those kinda of people that want to do the right thing and fuck everything else...before he was grievance officer, folks would just fight to keep *ANYONE* on board. Guys have a drug problem, well thats not their fault they showed up fucked up...we'll go on strike if you fire him. After, he made sure the slackers got fired because folks like that only made his job harder.
It got to the point, several of the idiots actually tried to organize against him, but they were already out of the union as they were no longer employees...and the others were such slack asses they couldn't get their act together. He was reelected several times to this postion even though it was not what he wanted to do (and was in fact campaigning for the guy running against him in his last position) before he finally had to tell them if they put him on the ballot again, he'd resign if elected.
Unfortunately, many others want the big votes. They go about it by trying to win too many friends. Those are the ones that get elected nationally. I don't think the nationals do shit for unions...most of it is organized crime, IMHO. But at the lower end, there are unions that actually do some good and help folks out that need it, and help get rid of the idiots that don't need to be there. I know there were a few cases he did support the case of the idiot, begrudgingly, but that was because the supervisors didn't have paperwork...and that was just prudent common sense to keep everyone else protected.
Professionals and unions in the same sentence? I don't know. I never liked the idea of unions, but as a tech worked continually fucked over in my day job simply because I'm working for the gov't -- making less that some janitors because they put in the time and organized -- I am starting to rethink this. Why not. As professionals, we could do it fairly and not have to organize ourselves like say the steelworkers so where the union is set up as if everyone was fucking morons...they aren't, but the union wants to control them and pretends they are just as the management does. Us being pros mean we might be able to come up with ways not to let organized crime get involved and to streamline it where it has secure and honest voting while protecting only our interests and nothing else...
Most IT workers I know are salaried workers. Meaning you got paid $X per year, divided up into weekly or biweekly payments. They could overwork you 80 hours a week or more, and you couldn't complain or else they'd use that At-Will Employment law to let you go. All other IT shops I knew about were the same.
That is, unless you were an entry level IT staffer on an hourly basis, and then overtime had to be approved by management before you could work it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Yeah, you said it. This is all nonsense. I thought this kind of thing was what unions are for (at least in theory *cough* *cough*). It's just like minimum wage laws. People think you can crank up the minimum wage and the money just materializes out of thin air. Somehow the idea of people losing jobs because of it, as well as paying higher prices (which hurts most those very people the law is supposed to help) doesn't seem to cross their minds. Meanwhile, laws make it harder and harder to get rid of employees without risking legal action, so the employees you are paying more for go down in quality, because there's less incentive to be productive and/or compete. Our communist friends took this to its logical conclusion but apparently could never see that its failure was inevitable.
I can appreciate that low income employees don't have much leverage, but I'm so sick of hearing the endless litany of regulations being passed. How long will it be until the rules are so complex that no one can understand them all and law enforcement can prosecute people at random because everyone's guilty of something if you look hard enough?
Oh, wait, that's already happened.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
This is not true. Safty concerns cause governments to regulate working hours. You want bigrig truck drivers on the road 16-20 hours at a time, falling asleep and causing accidents? You want to work with a 12 hour shift forklift operator who's getting tired making mistakes handling heavy skids?
IT is not immune either, the more time at the keyboard the quicker your wrists will degrade. You don't want the state to have to pay more for your, and everyone elses, medicare just because you worked 2 hours more a shift for 25 years, do you?
Safty First.
In theory the salaried employee should be averaging 40 hours week too. The idea is that keeping track of overtime and undertime is more work than it is worth for certain kinds of jobs. It is illegal for an employer to consistently expect more than 40 hours per week from an "exempt" employee.
However, in practice these salaried employees are often unaware of their rights, and in fact most of their management is unaware of the legalities of mandatory unpaid/uncompensated overtime. So, the effect is not just an ass-ramming but a group ass-ramming by all involved because none know any better.
That's one reason I enjoy working contracts at a set hourly rate. My ass remains strictly one-way and if somebody starts thinking about doing a little construction to make it two-way, I can just take off with no feelings of guilt or remorse.
Work once, paid once. Nice and simple.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Um, what if your boss, and all the other bosses, say, "work overtime for free." Or, what if, companies like walmart LOCK THEIR EMPLOYEES IN to get them to work overtime for free?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
"If you think your employer is being unfair THEN LEAVE!"
That only works if there is a labor shortage. With outsourcing dramatically expanding the labor pool and a never ending tide of illegal immigrants cratering wages for manual labor in the U.S. there is a near inevitability that there is going to be a huge labor surplus in the U.S. There probably already is though the government cleverly drops the long term unemployed out of the unemployment rate and labor statistics.
Employers are astute enough to know when there is surplus labor. They dream of it and pay their politicians to make it happen (which is why politician look the other way and allow massive illegal immigration and promote out sourcing). When the labor surplus arrives most greedy businessmen cut benefits and salaries, and praise be their profit margins go up. There are a few smart businessmen that value and nurture good employees but they are few and getting fewer.
American workers are going to really suffer in the near future, more than they already are. It is good you praised unions from the early 20th century. If it hadn't been for them everyone would be working 7 days a week 12 hours a day for poverty wages. It took violence to break greedy businessmen who thought thats all workers deserved. Without unions and with a labor surplus workers may well start marching back to the dark ages.
Unions did turn corrupt for the most part, it was to bad, but all big institutions corrupt, government and political parties included. But its also true business and the Republicans, starting with Reagan in particular, have worked hard to destroy them.
The disappearance of unions and the pressures of outsourceing, globalization and illegal immigrants are going to destroy the middle class in America. The U.S. is going to end up 95% poor and 5% filthy rich like most 3rd world countries. In the news today, Los Angeles is already there. The majority of people in LA are now functionally illiterate.
If your in the lucky 5% you wont care either. You will drive in to a gated community next to the golf course and just not care.
You might think you are just going to retrain and be immune I think you are wrong. Unless you have skills that can't be outsourced, or you have the benefit of being born affluent so you land in the 5% you simply wont be able to compete with workers and wage rates in China and India.
When manufacturing cratered they said retrain for IT. When IT got outsourced they said retrain for biotech. When biotech moved to India they said....
@de_machina
The "ridiculous practices" you refer to in such a vague way are worse than any modern wannabe-conservative-think-tanker cares to even consider when she's speaking glowingly of the private compact between worker and company. You mention specific business responses to Union activity -- the national guard and so on -- but you fail to characterize the terms of employment ordinary people lived with back then. They were striking for decent, human working conditions. Lining up around a business trying to shut it down doesn't come close to what they were subjected to in the ordinary course of their jobs. The business magnates of the day made the same arguments that they make today when they face any economic concession: if we have to give people working conditions that aren't appalling, that'll destroy our business. To describe them as not having the "moral high ground" is a ludicrous understatement. I mean:
That's about the "match girls' strike" of 1888 in Great Britain.
Like it or not, the U.S. isn't a pure laissez-faire economy. And you wouldn't trade your life now for one in such an economy, unless you're a Rockefeller posting as an AC out of shyness.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.