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US Senator Proposes Bill To Eliminate Overtime For IT Workers
New submitter Talisman writes "Kay Hagan (D) from North Carolina has introduced a bill to the Senate that would eliminate overtime pay for IT workers."
The bill is targeted at salaried IT employees and those whose hourly rate is $27.63 or more. It seems comprehensive in its description of what types of IT work qualify — everything from analysis and consulting to design and development to training and testing. The bill even uses "work related to computers" as one of the guidelines.
IT work already has a terrible education:pay ratio and the pay is nothing special in relative terms, that's a strange sector to target...could it have something to do with outsourcing?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
His theory of capitalism was, in a nutshell, that an employer's goal was to increase profit by increasing the amount they could make their workers work without paying them anything extra. Which is, of course, exactly what is being codified in this law.
Consider some widget that cost $300 to make $250 in materials and $50 for 1 worker to work 6 hours on it. But our capitalist wants to make more money, so he makes his worker work 12 hours instead of 6 (which the worker accepts, because being unemployed is so much worse), so now he has $600 worth of widgets, which are now $500 in materials, $50 in labor, and $50 in profit.
Regardless of what you think about communism, Marx's theories of capitalism need to be taken seriously, because the guy was predicting, in the 1870's, a lot of the economic behavior we see today.
I am officially gone from
(Posting Anon as IBM employee. Opinions are my own, I don't speak for them etc etc)
I've worked for IBM in two countries. I have been paid overtime in neither one. The flip side of this is that I haven't been expected to work ovetime.
Sure, I've put in a few extra hours at crunch time, but nobody forced me to. And crunch time means just that - a couple of weeks before an important deadline, if there's something critical needing fixing. Doesn't even happen every release, or every year.
As far as I can tell, Big Blue respect the whole concept of work/life balance, and having people well rested and working sensible hours. I doubt very much they would have lobbied for this.
Sponsoring a build doesn't always mean you support it.
Harry Reid (D) sponsored President Obama's Job bill in the Senate, then voted AGAINST it.
This is done to bring the bill up to a vote, so it can be voted down.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Yes and individuals who aren't already in exempt positions (all high level IT positions are exempt already) don't really have much leverage for negotiation on an individual basis. Low level positions are on the wrong side of the many-to-one ratio with there many employees/applicants and only one employer. One-to-one, all else being equal, you have equivalent leverage. The minute there are two positions the employers leverage doubles while the employees/applicants leverage stays the same.
Unions help to restore the balance by consolidating the employees in order to bring it back to one-to-one.
Yep. That whole thing about "network" is what will screw the cable workers. Most systems now use a DNCS, or Digital Network Control System, about half of which are provided by Cisco acquisition Scientific Atlanta.
At the heart of the headend is a big Solaris machine that handles provisioning for all of the cable boxes and acts like a supervisor blade in a large router. From there, the individual set-top boxes are addressed via IP on a hybrid fiber-coax network, making nearly every cable TV system in the United States a large network.
Headend engineers are already pretty much IT people, but the line techs have clung to their non-exempt blue collar status for years and it costs the cable companies out the wazoo. They've tried to enforce no-overtime policies, but their customer service rates and rate at which they can install new customers plummets.
This isn't the first time the industry has gone out of it's way to screw line techs either. About 8 years ago, Time Warner, Adelphia, Cox, and Comcast all, right around the same time, put policies in place to prevent workers over a certain weight from being certified to climb poles or operate in bucket trucks. The restrictions were based only on weight, not accounting for height, build, or experience, so tall muscular guys were being pulled off of poles that short fat guys were allowed to climb. The effect of this was that fewer and fewer line techs were allowed to do the work that paid a premium and were stuck in jobs like customer premise installation which had some very strict hour restrictions. Again, voila, less overtime.