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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 Or were they merely designed to streamline outdated rules?"
If you actually read the article, it says that the House only put an admendment into the Spending bill and that the Senate might very well remove it before it gets to the President. So it is far from scrapped, so don't go looking to your boss for your overtime yet...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
For us Slashdot members who spend 40+ hours a week posting on Slashdot to qualify under these overtime rules.
Oh.... that's what employers expect you to give voluntarily!
I remember years ago doing that, when I really loved my work and didn't care. Besides, I liked all the cool stuff I got to play with and the really neat server and top of the line PC on my desk with a spifftacular monitor and video card and even a cordless mouse. Then something happened, they realized I would do anything they wanted as along as I had the toys. Eventually I put in 16-18 hours days and began wrecking my health and I wouldn't qualify for any extra pay anyway because I was salaried, not hourly. The expectations piled up with the work load and I found I had scant time left to experience the joys of doing neat projects or learning new tools and languages after work, because I was burning out big time. Then they outsourced the jobs and said, "It was a good thing, win-win" Well, that might have been true because the contractor, if they signed me, wouldn't allow their employee to be treated like I had without them getting some really fat zorkmids for the above and beyond. I didn't sign with them and left.
Now it's kinda back to the old thing, hourly and no budget for overtime so don't ask for it, but if something really does need to get done???
BTW we don't have a lot of positions here where you'd get overtime or benefits for that matter as many are 4 hours/day, which even with a little overage wouldn't hit the 32 hours where benefits are required to be given. (Rhetorical question-<)The real puzzle is, why can't we find good workers?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
If technology workers unionized, they could use collective bargining to get overtime via contract. Funny, one mentions unions to tech people and the techs cringe. My how workers view of themselves has changed.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Unions: Helping The Lowest Common Denominator Advance!®
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Reduce the need to pay ANYONE overtime, and shaft IT workers. Typical big business lobbying.
The only IT workers that I know of that earn hourly wages, and get OT pay as a result, are computer store employees. I guess some interns I know would qualify as well. I think we need a slashdot poll: when was the last time you got overtime pay for an IT job?
Instead of designating workers as "professional" under the new law and avoiding OT pay, companies can currently just pay a salary. The only difference is that companies will no longer be able to shaft low income workers.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Its just because the IT field is an esoteric area and easily targeted. You never hear people try to pass legislation to prevent the plumbers from making overtime, etc. Even though they get a good deal of money per hour, and I'm sure a great deal in overtime. Its basically pick out a job that most people don't understand, and feel they get paid too much. Doesn't make sense to me.
je suis parce que j'aime
Do you think there would be an increase in skill level or a decrease in skill level because of "union protection" ?
-Randy
Under the new overtime rules, a factory worker could be denied overtime pay merely if his employer sent him to a seminar for training.
As an attorney, I have no problem not getting overtime pay when I work over 40 hours per week. I didn't spend 7+ years in school to spend my work day looking at the clock.
But anyone doing drudge work should certainly be paid overtime for more than 40 hours per week.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
Overtime is in shorter supply than regular time, after the government applied the labor equivalent of "overfarming" constraints as a "40 hour week". Corporations buy labor, so they want the government to fix the market prices. They'd rather have no minimum labor price, but $5.15:h is acceptably cheap, and a low ceiling for illegal laborers.
--
make install -not war
Unions protect themselves, not employees. A long time ago they did actually protect employees. Now they are all about self preservation and big fat checks to union operatives. A friend of mine is in a union shop, she pays the equivalent of ONE HOUR PER WEEK in dues. What does it get her? She gets to watch lazy good for nothings keep a job they don't deserve or work for. Is that the kind of place you want to work?
Professional and Union do not belong in the same sentence. If your worried about overtime then don't switch to a job that doesn't have real responsibilities and real deadlines. The people who put the most "overtime" in are already exempt, they are the small businessmen who provide the majority of jobs across the country.
If you think your employer is being unfair THEN LEAVE! The economy is no where near as bad as when the tech sector crashed. If your immediate skills are not valued then LEARN SOMETHING ELSE. No one is going to get you a job, especially a president or contender.
Its your responsibility to act. Do it and quit whining. Whining just makes you miserable and annoys the others who are having to put up with you.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What about the Bush plan to replace the 50% increase in pay for each overtime hour with comptime on a 1 hour to 1 hour basis. You know, the comp time that you could only take if your employeer agreed.
Who is the person/people who came up with the idea to do this?
and...
What groups will this have an impact on? Nobody I know who makes over 100k is hourly. Doctors? Yah right.
Serioiusly, I don't think I've gotten overtime pay approved for any job I've had since getting my college degree- including those jobs where I was on a Salary, carried a pager 24 hours a day, and worked 70 hour weeks.
If anything, I'd like to see the rules changed to be MORE inclusive- anybody getting a paycheck should have benefits if they work over 32 hours a week and overtime pay for over 40, regardless of who they are and what they do. Even managment deserves this.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Of all the crap passed in the past 3.8 years this would be the first thing that Bush vetoes, if he follows thru with his veto threat.
That should tell you something.
When overtime pay was first instituted, it was an attempt to compensate employees in cases where their employers forced them to work long hours. In a sense, it was designed as a disincentive for employers to overwork their employees -- taking time away from their families, burning them out and increasing the potential risk for injury etc. Not only would employees have to be paid for overtime hours (not always a given, in the past), but they'd actually have to be paid more than their regular wage.
Now look at how this measure is being cast. We want to give employers back their right to overtime pay because they need to work longer hours to make more money. In other words, we're not voting down this reduction in overtime because we think our working people are overtaxed and already work longer hours than any other country in the civilized world (they are). We're voting it down in affirmation of Joe Sixpack's right to work longer hours so he can put food on his table. Meanwhile, what has the government been spending your taxes on lately? My, what a wonderful system we have.
Breakfast served all day!
This is about presidential politics. The new overtime rules was a target for the dems, and was gaining some sorts of traction. Republican house all of the sudden gets a vote to roll back the rules.
Problem solved. There is always after the election to bring the rules back...
Because those are the only two possibilities.
For those of you keeping score at home, this is known as a false dichotomy, one of the classic logical fallacies. Basically, you present two options as if they are the only options, when in reality there are one or more other possibilities. A classic example is when a lawyer asks a defendant, "Did you murder John, or do you expect us to believe that he shot himself?" when there's the obvious third possibility that someone else killed John. (Assuming John was found dead of a gunshot wound.)
A third possibility about the overtime rules, and the most likely answer, is that they were the result of a complex miasma of conflicting goals, much like most of politics. Of course, most people seem to feel a need to simplify these complex situations into some kind of simple either-or choice. Which is retarded.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
The steel industry would be dying in the United States reguardless. If it was not unionized the workers would be getting paid that much less, working that much more, and the benefits would be even fewer. A steel worker's job is incredibly uncomfortable (read: hot as hell), demanding (blast furnaces often run 24/7 on two 12 hour shifts), and dangerous (large machinery, liquid metal, you do the math). Without unions watching their asses the grunts could easily get screwed, and it would make it that much harder for the families of the men to get compensation if they're an accident. The point is this: this is the kind of job you either get paid a good bit to do or you send to X third world country to someone who will take whatever job they can get no matter the risk.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
You'll have to work overtime to find one.
That ain't liver; that's beef kidney!
(Too late for mod points)
Overtime laws exist because businesses wanted them. It came with the 40 hour work week. You see, unions were strong and getting stronger 100 years ago. They were winning 35 hour work weeks. Management pushed for labor protection laws in an effort to cut their losses to unions and to undercut the labor machine by giving them some of what they wanted.
It worked. Labor unions maintained influence, but haven't been nearly as strong as they would have been had management not made concessions country-wide in the form of overtime laws.
So... you can thank management for overtime laws, circa 100 years ago. Methinks if overtime laws disapeared, you'd see a surge in union membership... something that I doubt you'd be very interested in.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
WOW!
Get nothing done and get paid for it!
Get something done and still get paid for it!
Undo something that has already been done and GET PAID FOR IT!!
That's it, I'm running for Mayor(tm) this next term!
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
Thats ok, as long as there is some ballance, such as when theres slack time, you tell them to get out of there. I also expect developers under me to work hard to, if im working hard, thats my responsibility to divide up the work properly.
In your example above, it looks like the employies are not being supervised properly. It is also not the responsibility of the employee to makeup a schedule that the employer underbid or underestimated.
Programming for over 20 years, I have only seen this work once. As there is always a next project. That can be started on early. Or maintance on existing apps.
Thats ok if your salary justifies working 60 hours a week, or it was made up front that you would average 60 hours a week. If you were beaten down in price, and told the average programmer works 45 hours a week, then its not.
From IT Managers Journal
"Efstathiou agreed that while most IT workers would not be eligible for OT under the new rules, employers are likely to make up for any potential losses in salary or higher hourly pay."
I don't know about the rest of you but, I've never worked for a corp that decided to raise my pay because I worked a lot of "unpaid" hours. Hell most corps think compensation is something they have to hide from the IRS or its something the employees must give for the privlage of working.
"Efstathiou said some workers, such as sysadmins providing 24/7 datacenter support, may be hurt by the new rules, but added the biggest impact may be for employers when economic conditions improve."
"The law itself will serve to accelerate and exacerbate turnover and will impact employers more than employees," Efstathiou predicted. "That costs a fortune."
How is it going to affect the employer when most techs are unable to leave their jobs because there aren't any jobs to go to. Oh, my bad, he said "In the future, when the economy is better". Sorry, before the bubble burst it was possible to jump jobs with a reasonable expectation that there was another job waiting. That is not common in the IT world today nor will it be again simply because of the amount of IT workers competing for that same job.
I hear and understand the comment of the small business owner with respect to not wanting to pay overtime. He wants his employees to work hard just like he does.
And so if they work just as hard as he does and he sets them up on a salary basis as exempt workers, do they get to sell part of his company when they retire? Do they get a portion of the proceeds of his sale of the business? Do they get a portion of the company when his son or daughter inherits it?
Obviously not, so their investment in the company's well being is lower. And the small businessman only has one incentive with which to motivate his employees to work as hard as he does, money.
Paid overtime is money. And lots of people across the US are living (at least partially) on their overtime. Which says something about what has happened in our society since the 1930s and before (which is where the right wing of the Republican Party wants to return us). It used to be possible to buy a home and raise children with one income. Now couples need two. And single people need overtime in order to do the same.
But the real reason why the government took issue with this ruling of the Bush administration is that when a worker makes overtime, so does the government. Essentially, what Bush is doing with this ruling is he is setting up for an even larger ballooning of the federal deficit because workers making more than subsistence income may easily be exempted from overtime pay and that middle-class segment of America pays the most taxes.
To a certain extent, moderate Republicans will vote with Democrats on this issue because they want to win re-election and it's hard to face an electorate when your opponent claims you just caused everyone to take a pay cut. And some conservative Republicans may be wooed on this issue if they are budget deficit hawks. The article seems to suggest that the Senate won't pass the amendment. Lets hope they do.
I make around $100,000 yearly and greatly benefit (as well as does my State and the Federal Government) from my overtime pay. Under the DOL's ruling, I'd be forced to take a pay cut to around $87,000 yearly. And that means the difference between living comfortably (in the NYC area) and having trouble paying bills.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Check out this site for the actual rules:
p ay /main.htm
:)
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fair
And the toll-free number: 1-866-4USWAGE
Looking at this quote (taken from the fairpay site) it appears that we will only be out the half part of the time-and-a-half. Nowhere does it say that you would not get the straight time portion for the hours that you worked.
The FLSA requires that most employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all hours worked and overtime pay at time and one-half the regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 hours in a workweek
I checked with my ex-wife, and she agrees that this is the correct interpretation of the rules. Whether the DOL agrees or not is a different thing...
For me it's academic, so far I have managed to maintain my goal of zero hours of OT for the year
John
I dream in binary.
is maybe the only excuse posible to use in order to avoid working extra hours ..
.. and the number of days have gone up to 5.
:-)
I live and work in Denmark and our working conditions are a bit different from the American.
From the first year I worked (as a programmer) I've had 5 weeks vacation every year. With 3 days extra off to "take care of the kids". The last part has been changed so people without kids can have days off as well
I do not get paid for doing extra hours, unless I have a specific agreement (from time to time) with the company. Extra hours, "within reason" are included in my salary. So, all I have to do is having an excuse to go home at a reasonable hour every day, thus avoiding extra hours. (dificult at times but it works)
Fair?
Well, the company pays my IBM T30 (a few years old now), my DSL line, my land line, and my mobile phone (usage on all included).
Dental and Health is taken care of by the State and my overall taxes last year was 45%.
I am not a member of the union, but benefit from the deals they strike anyway. If the company piss on me, I have to let them, unless I become a member and have the union piss back..
Something rotten in the State of Denmark?
not really..
From the Confederation of British Industry - from accountancyage.com
"The organisation for business leaders has indicated that the minimum wage is working and would be happy to see it increased if the economic environment is right.
The CBI's director general, Digby Jones, said: 'The minimum wage has so far been a success and it should not wither on the vine, so business supports modest rises if economic circumstances allow.'"
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.