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CA Legislature Torpedoes IT Overtime
An anonymous reader writes to mention that a recent piece of California legislation is enabling tech firms to avoid paying their workers overtime. Originally designed to deal with bonds for children's hospitals, bill AB10 was completely rewritten to prevent lawsuit damages over overtime nonpayment. "'This is the first time that the Legislature has done a takeaway of the rights of private-sector workers as part of the budget deal,' said Caitlin Vega of the California Labor Federation. 'We just think it is wrong. We think it will really hurt the groups of workers who will be expected to work through the weekend and not get paid.'"
Seriously?
/. readership would go down... come on admit it... how many are at work right now.
Unions in this country have long outlived their usefulness.
Besides, if employers made reasonable demands of the unionized employees,
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
The bill explicitly exempts those "computer professionals" who make at least $75,000 annually doing full-time work. I should be heartbroken that they're not entitled to overtime pay?
Yes, yes, we all know that IT guys toil long hours in the datacenter. Guess what? Salespeople have to travel all the time and often spend weeks away from their families. Operations managers need to crunch budgets and give presentations at the last minute. Team leaders are expected to spend their weekends doing "team-building exercises." Everybody has to work a lot in today's America.
Don't like it? Negotiate yourself a better deal. Being exempt from overtime status is a two-way street. On the one hand, you don't get paid for the long hours you put in. On the other hand, your employer can't make you report how many hours you worked. If you find you're working too many hours, maybe the problem is you. Either you're playing the game of "I don't want to be the first one to leave," or maybe you're working too much because you're not accurately budgeting your workload, or maybe you're just not that good at your job. If they're paying you $75,000 a year, you ought to be smart enough to figure out how to fix the problem.
Breakfast served all day!
There are two Americas. In one America, people get paid according to hours worked and in accordance with clearly stated policies. The other America is IT.
I don't work in IT, but I've never had a salaried 9-5 job. Most salaried knowledge workers get paid an annual fee for delivering a product, project, or service to a company or firm. If you want to get "paid according to hours worked and in accordance with clearly stated policies," I suggest you take up cleaning toilets or flipping burgers. There are very few salaried jobs that exist with those parameters.