Slashdot Mirror
Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations?
Paul Fernhout writes: Nick Hanauer is a billionaire who made his fortune as one of the original investors in Amazon. He suggests President Obama should restore U.S. overtime regulations to how they worked in the 1970s to boost the economy. Quoted by PBS NewsHour: "In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay — the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime — has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime.
Many millions of Americans are currently exempt from the overtime rules — teachers, federal employees, doctors, computer professionals, etc. — and corporate leaders are lobbying hard to expand "computer professional" to mean just about anybody who uses a computer. Which is almost everybody. But were the Labor Department instead to narrow these exemptions, millions more Americans would receive the overtime pay they deserve. ... The twisted irony is, when you work more hours for less pay, you hurt not only yourself, you hurt the real economy by depressing wages, increasing unemployment and reducing demand and innovation. Ironically, when you earn less, and unemployment is high, it even hurts capitalists like me." If overtime pay is generally good for the economy, should most IT professionals really be exempt from overtime regulations?
Many millions of Americans are currently exempt from the overtime rules — teachers, federal employees, doctors, computer professionals, etc. — and corporate leaders are lobbying hard to expand "computer professional" to mean just about anybody who uses a computer. Which is almost everybody. But were the Labor Department instead to narrow these exemptions, millions more Americans would receive the overtime pay they deserve. ... The twisted irony is, when you work more hours for less pay, you hurt not only yourself, you hurt the real economy by depressing wages, increasing unemployment and reducing demand and innovation. Ironically, when you earn less, and unemployment is high, it even hurts capitalists like me." If overtime pay is generally good for the economy, should most IT professionals really be exempt from overtime regulations?
As a manager and an employee, I vote No for overtime regulation exemptions. If a business is dependent upon their employees working for free after 40 hours, then their business model is flawed and it is better for everyone if they go under.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Project managers should be held accountable for their dubious scheduling practices and failures to estimate and manage project schedules effectively. Greater reward for IT professionals working overtime would hopefully translate into more regular work schedules, rather than being coerced into taking time away from families and loved ones in order to cover a PM's butt.
Why are we just discussing IT professionals?
Why not have everyone who works overtime (defined as work done after 40 hours for a given week) be paid time and a half, regardless of their profession/job?
And while we're on it, why not have a normal work week go back to 35 hours instead of 40?
I'm a self-made man - I built the hospital I was born in, started teaching myself at age 11 months, and I got to where I am on my own.
I don't need the nanny state to make sure I and my peers are fairly compensated.
What's next, mandatory clean water? Then clean air? Where does it end?
Socialism, that's where.
No way, not for me!
Old-style "salaried" meant that you didn't have to worry about your hours, and neither did your managers - you'd get you work done, and could take off, say, for a federal holiday. Now - I'd put down a $10 that 99% of you who are in IT work, or have worked, over 40 hours, had vacation time or holidays that you couldn't take, or, like I do, have to "make up" the hours if the federal gov't shuts down or has a holiday, and we *don't*.
By definition, it means what you're really just fairly well-paid hourly employees. *Hourly* employees get time and a half overtime, and double time for working on, say, holdiays. But you're all making *so* much money that you don't care (nor do you have a life outside of work), right?
mark "would be seriously tempted to strangle a manager who said, 'whatever it takes'"
I'm an IT Manager. I weekly am required to make my dudes work 45-50 hours. Two or three times a year, they put in 65 - 70 hour weeks. They get nothing for the OT except MAYBE comp-time. I don't even get the comp-time.
I am in favor of this. If the IT dudes were treated the same as everyone else, they wouldn't be required to work themselves half to death and get a reputation for being sullen.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Exempt status used to be reserved for highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, managers).
At my last company, they made people work 72 hours a week for months. We had multiple heart attacks- and several divorces. They took advantage of the bad job market created partly by the fact that companies can work IT people 72 hours a week.
Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income or you are supervising, hiring, firing, and making pay decisions over at least a few other people.
Any work on actual holidays should be double time.
Conditions in many IT shops in the united states are horrific now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And double time on Sundays.
Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.
I have worked at a very few places where it was cool hip and fun. Working late into the night was a joy and basically hanging out with like minded people. But the vast majority of programmers are wage slaves working in cubeville. Terrible management often results in death marches where programmers are basically expected to work 24 hours a day and sleeping is barely tolerated. These death marches are basically the norm at most companies seeing that most managers/marketing people over promise, under manage, and under pay their staff.
These programmers desperately need protection. The few places where happy people love their jobs do not justify allowing companies (especially game companies) to exploit their workers to the point where their wives start an organization to protest the horrible working conditions (literally).
Overtime of 1.5x or 2x discourages employers from having overtime, and instead hire more people. It's generally better for unemployment numbers to employe more people full-time than it is to over-employ fewer people by having them work lots of overtime.
Employees are somewhat discouraged to work overtime long term because usually the extra money is not worth it. But let us not pretend that employees have much say in when and how they work. They don't usually have a lot of bargaining power.
But labor unions do have a lot of bargaining power, and they have consistently pushed to have lots of overtime hours at a high pay so that union members can effectively net higher incomes. Higher incomes are usually good for individuals, unless they are doing it just to scrape by or have no choice in finding a good work-family balance. Higher incomes are almost always better for unions as it can increase the dues they collect without diluting their voting blocs with the introduction of a lot of new members.
The system of employers and unions is quite corrupt, I hope that isn't a surprise to any of you.
I think employers should pay 3x overtime, but only give 1.5x to the employees and 1.5x goes into a social program. I don't really care which one, but best to pick one that has the right poetic justice. Like financial support for the unemployed, or healthcare for the poor. If you're force to work 10 hour days, might as well force you to send the money to someone who can use it rather than line the pockets of your union reps. I was tempted to suggest that it would be 1x to the employee and 2x to a fund, but I know that it would make it easier for people to collude to work off the clock if there is zero benefit to whistle-blowing. (not that 50% of your hourly rate is much payment for something high risk like reporting your company for fraud)
The other advantage of having the overtime go to a fund is when a business tries to commit fraud it becomes a type of tax fraud. The IRS is way more aggressive at pursuing tax fraud than the various state agency that handle prosecution of compensation that violates state code.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
No.
Strange. because it has been a few decades since I was in the salaried worker pool. But way back then, I wasn't aware of a threshold. I got overtime (1.5x) or not depending on the definition of my job. And back then I was bringing in around $150K/year.
The OT/no OT decision was based on the definition in the National Labor Relations Act of an exempt professional: doing work
"involving the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment in its performance"
and
"of such a character that the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time"
So when the boss walked up and told me how to do my job, or told me that he expected me to work to a rigid schedule, I just replied, "Thanks buddy. That'll be $120/hour for anything over 40 hours per week. Or get your damned nose out of my cubicle and I'll solve the problem as best I can."
In spite of this sounding like a rather snotty attitude, it did serve to remind my employer of the economics of employees as a resource. You want X done at a certain rate (lines of code, sheets of engineering drawings or pages of specifications), fine. Pay for the work by the hour. You want me to take on some risk for getting a challenging job done? I'll work for a fixed price, but only if I have the flexibility to control my processes, tools and working environment. Quite a few enlightened managers saw the value in the latter option.
Have gnu, will travel.
My contract specifically states that I can't work any overtime at all. I can only work from Monday through Friday during normal business hours. That's fine with me.
Thanks for the link, AC: http://www.economist.com/blogs... ... The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher. ... So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive. And, as Russell argued, working less will guarantee âoehappiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia"."
"Working hours: Get a life
Interesting comments there like on work culture in South Korea, and I've just read the first couple comments of hundreds...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
but not much to do at home besides watch TV.
There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.
I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
No, you don't "deserve" anything other than what you negotiate
Did you negotiate to have a safe work environment? How about handicap accessibility should you ever end up, even temporarily, in a wheelchair? Id you negotiate a lower salary in trade for not having to endure sexual harassment? Your statement is very naive and immature (read Ayn Rand much do we?).
There is huge value in have the playing field somewhat level for a lot of basic things. Employment is inherently a lopsided arrangement. The employer has a lot more power than you do, so it become necessary to have some bigger entity keep things fair, safe, and liveable. Unions along with state and local government end up balancing the scales.
History is littered with examples of company towns, H1B abuse, child labor, black lung, and many other dark chapters for employees who could choose between whatever the company chose or starving in the street (or worse). Arguing that most employees have almost any meaningful bargaining power is just moronic.
Nobody should be exempt from time and a half except the owners of a business. Anyone who works for pay should get paid overtime, if only to punish companies and businesses that insist on overworking their employees instead of hiring more staff to handle the load.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Medical is likely to remain that way because of how hospitals work
Hospitals don't need doctors and nurses pulling insane 24-48 hour shifts (I know they do this because a friend is a nurse), they just do it to save money and not have to hire anyone new. We should let them get overtime and force hospitals to hire more staff and make better shift schedules -- maybe that would help cut down on the crazy wait time just to see your general practitioner, as well as medical mistakes from sleepiness too.
managers pretty much have to have OT on big projects
How about managers (upper management?) learn to make realistic project schedules instead of overworking the employees while they high-five and go to the golf course to celebrate getting a job "done early". Again, let's let managers get paid overtime, and expect employers to make real schedules.. or if they need it to be faster, hire more people before the project starts!
salesmen often work in a manner that makes tracking actual hours of work impractical.
Salesmen often have to travel and I agree that makes it more difficult. However, we can treat it like we would for truck drivers, etc. -- salesmen are allotted x number of hours/days of travel (the travel itself should be considered work, meaning they work 14-16 hour days if we don't include sleep and food), and when they get back, they MUST have mandatory paid time off or they earn overtime on their regular work in the office for the rest of the month. I'm just spouting off an idea here, I'm sure it has some flaws and could be refined, but the point is there is a way to handle odd schedules and still be fair to the employee.
IT could certainly use updated laws. Too many times you have to be on-call, come in on weekends at 3am to fix a server, rush a software project out the door, etc. Same things as above hold -- companies will learn to make better schedules or hire more people if such labor laws are in place. They will bitch about it at first, but they will adapt. There is nothing sacred that makes 60+ hour weekly schedules the only way to do work in these fields.
So, ultimately, the whole thing is self-defeating in general. Crunch times may be one thing, but on a regular basis, productivity declines even as people look busy.
One example:
http://www.inc.com/jessica-sti...
"The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision....
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers' Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. 'Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,' writes Robinson; 'and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.'
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day."
With software, it is so easy to introduce a bug when you are tired or distracted (one reason team programming often saves money). A bug (especially a conceptual one) might be very expensive to debug down the road, especially if it makes its way to production. How many times have programmers spent days chasing a bug that was a one line fix? So, it may well be the case that longer hours mean *negative* productivity and higher costs for the extra hours worked past 40 per week even when the employee is not paid for the hours.
There is another complicating factor. Big companies in the 1970s such as HP or IBM invested in actually training employees, creating the pool of workers that Silicon Valley drew from initially. Investing in employee training is now rare, due in part due to little loyalty on either side of the employee/employer relationship in many companies. So, given that the tech industry moves so fast, where does the training time come from (including to read Slashdot :-)? Ideally, training should happen during those 40 hours. But in practice, many people working in IT have to keep current on their own time.
Yet training produces many benefits:
http://www.psychologicalscienc...
"A new study from a team of European researchers found that job training may also be a good strategy for companies looking to hire and retain top talent. When workers felt like they had received better job training options, they were also more likely to report a greater sense of commitment to their employer.
For the study, psychological scientists Rita Fontinha, Maria Jose Chambel, and Nele De Cuyper looked at IT outsourcers in Portugal-who must constantly update their skills in order to keep up with the fast pace of new technology. The researchers hypothesized that when people were happy with the training opportunities their employer provided, they would be more motivated to reciprocate with an enhanced sense of loyalty to the company.
This kind of informal balance of expectations between employees and management is known as a "psychological contract." When workers feel that their employer has fulfilled their obligations under the psychological contract, they're more motivated to uphold their
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So they can walk out at 10am without consequence?
Of course, you seem to suggest, daddy can always find them another job.
Please be serious instead of this stupid little game where you roleplay a reactionary aristocrat.