Slashdot Mirror
Workers In Brazil Can Claim Overtime For Answering Email After Hours
New submitter zzyvits writes "With smartphones becoming more and more common, the push for employees to work after hours is becoming greater. Would the push be as hard if the employers had to pay for it? A law recently passed in Brazil makes it possible for employees who answer emails after normal work hours to claim overtime pay."
Who is responsible for being so fair to workers? We'd never get that here (meaning US.)
People also use their smartphone more during work hours for all things but work.
If you work after hours (no matter what you are specifically doing) and you are employed on a hourly basis then of course you can claim overtime. You do not need a specific law for this.
In Brazil, salaried workers get paid overtime if they work over 44 hours a week or more than 8 hours in a single day. So, if you worked a normal 40 hour week, but had to pull 10 hours on a tuesday, you get paid your salary plus 2 hours overtime.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
1. Team up with a co-worker.
2. Exchange a long string of emails back and forth each evening.
3. Profit!
This isn't new, isn't specific to smartphones, and (as noted in the article) isn't unique to Brazil. Many employers have the ability to allow employees to check work email remotely from their home PCs. However, most sophisticated employers (or perhaps more paranoid) are careful about opening up such access to non-exempt employees (i.e. employees who are paid on an hourly basis) because of wage and hour issues. My employer (a US healthcare system) requires non-exempt employees to get manager permission before remote access is enabled and even then there are explicit rules about when the employees should be accessing email remotely. Compliance can be easily monitored but, conversely, wage and hour problems can also be easily proven through log in records.
Not paying overtime by not requiring overtime work is exactly the purpose of this legislation I believe. What is wrong with that?
Maybe I want to market myself as somebody who isn't worried about inhaling toxic gasses. Worker safety laws are a coercion of freedom.
If workers don't want to inhale toxic gasses, then they won't take those jobs. Just like how that happened before worker safety laws.
. . . will be the last one to receive a promotion . . .
Dynamically weight and sort promotion list based on willingness to do overtime email for free.
Patent this.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Brazil is a leftist country, which means they take workers' rights seriously. You see, as there is a competition in a labour market, without regulations like minimal wage or overtime pay the companies could just require workers to work more for less pay, because there would always be someone else to take the job. By regulating overtime, the state ends the competition between the workers, thus solving the prisoners dilemma scenario and resulting in an environment that's better for everyone.
How is dictating that employees who do work must be paid for said work reducing freedom? Is it reducing freedom to outlaw theft, too?
Generally speaking, it's possible to contract around laws. In Canada, a collective agreement has the first priority, and then any areas not covered by the CA fall to the employment legislation.
At which point HR will look rather closely at your "work related activity" out of hours. At the very least they will just not pay you that over time, and every single hour that you claim after that will be scrutinized. Or they will just fire you for fraud. You might get away with a few hours every month, but "each evening" will earn you the pink slip you deserve.
The system relies on people being honest.
VW already do this with their Blackberry servers, although the state aim was to encourage a better work life balance. I realise this concept is strange to a lot of Americans - but there are companies out there that do this.
Well, while we wait for our south american countries to become as nice as Hong Kong, we have families to feed. And without regulation, companies have screwed the workers as much as possible. We've had very low regulation periods (aka the 30s, 70s, 90s) and companies didn't use that to create jobs nor make the economy flourish but to ransack as much as they could. Hey, even banks like Citybank and Bank Boston (champions of the free market?) decided not to pay our bank deposits back in 2001. So what did we do? We realized that very oftenly the champions of free markets are big hypocrites and that they would screw us unless we set regulations. Its all nice to assume that you can stand up to your boss and demand better compensation/conditions, but here that has oftenly resulted in you becoming a good example for the rest of workers of what not to do. So, we have unions, and unions demand regulations. And thanks to that, conditions are better even for non union workers. And companies still do business here, because its still convenient to them. As soon as you have way more workers than jobs, things get ugly for workers. Hence the need for government regulation, investment, etc... It must have been a bit over 50 countries that bought the "super neoliberalism free market" thing in the 90s. Most flopped. It surprises me how a country (the US) that implements a lot of Keynesian (and less optimal, like military spending) measures is on so much denial about it. To build the interstate system it had to be shown as a military/strategic thing, because that'd be good, but making it just to boost the economy or give people more comfortable travel would be a communist horror.
I don't think that's the reason why worker safety laws exist. The problem is not so much the fact that I as a worker am unable to assess risk, but rather that I might end up in a world where all jobs that are available to me are risky, as there is no incentive for employers to take measures to eliminate those risks.
At this point, free-market types will argue that, if enough workers refuse to work for the risky jobs, there will be demand for an employer that actually takes measures to eliminate them, thus making a more competitive offer to prospective employees. Except that oftentimes the labor market does not work that way: usually the employer can afford not to hire someone, but that someone cannot afford to be unemployed. Doubly so in an economy with a high unemployment rate, and triply so for jobs that require little to no qualification --- and ironically, those are usually the riskier ones.
Here's the way I see it: worker safety laws are a way to correct the distortions in the labor market caused by the imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. If you don't have them, you will likely end up with something resembling feudalism more than a free market(*).
(*) I mean the one with all the nice properties put forth in microeconomics courses, not the "laissez-faire and hope for the best" approach.
Score: i, Imaginary
Countries like Hong Kong seem to do OK with very few regulations, because their over-supply of workers induced more businesses to start up inevitably reducing that over-supply of workers.
Do you really try to compare the economy of a city-state to a huge country like Brazil?
America was the same as they used to let anyone in the world come here, and by the millions per year they did. By the end of that period America had the most diverse and powerful economy on the planet.
Being the most powerful economy doesn't do much good when only a few percent of the citizens gets a share of that booming economy due to inequalities.
in order to pay overtime for reading emails off the clock, the company must first subtract the time the employees spend on slashdot, facebook, checking personal emails and other websites while on the clock. Seems to me most employees would owe the companies.
Is it a result of economic theory that it's not a coincidence? If it is, I would be truly interested if you could point me to a proof. It seems to me that the argument that unemployment in a free market leads to the creation of new jobs only holds if you assume that an excess in supply always leads to a corresponding increase in demand. I'm sure there is more than one counterexample to that.
Score: i, Imaginary
I think there should be a law that if an employee asks the CEO of a company to take his kid to school, MAYBE the CEO could bill the employee for it.
Oh wait... that NEVER happens, but he’ll ask you to take time FROM YOUR FUCKING FAMILY AND FRIENDS AND PERSONAL LIFE, to
DO SHIT FOR HIM, so he can PROFIT FROM YOUR FREE WORK!
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE????????????????
I won’t reply to an e-mail offhours even if it’s somebody asking for help
as they are being cut down to pieces by some psycho.
I’d buy the DVD though, and piss on it, and then dig the body out of the
grave and fuck its ass.
Employees owe NOTHING - NOT A FUCKING THINK - to employers.
I’ve gotten a few jobs with the INTENT of seeing how much I can get away
with with being CORRECT.
Let me repeat things for you retarded lemmings: I have gotten jobs
with the sole intention of seeing how long I can go without being
fired by DOING THE RIGHT THING at all times.
It goes from 6 to 12 months.
Unless you are willing to be a lil bitch and get fucked in the ass, you
WILL get fired.
There is only one solution, bitches, don’t get raped: become the rapist.
Start a company, and hire fucktards with a family to support and
then fuck them in the ass with unpaid overtime and generally
making them your bitches!!!! They’ll do it, cause they are thinking
OF THE CHILDREN.
Fucking cowards. Stand up for yourselves, fucking douches!
Nobody makes me their bitch.
P.S. - Don’t mistake my anger for being a poor professional.
I AM A FUCKING GOD. My anger derives from having a small
penis - still, I am right about this shit.
Prior to the "free market" reforms of the early 90's, Sweden had an unemployment rate hovering around 1-4%. Of course for those advocating the current "free market" system, that is below the rate of unemployment preferred, workers should be sufficiently desperate to take crap jobs at crap salaries. The current unemployment rate is about 8%.