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Who Owns Your Overtime?
HughPickens.com writes: Fran Sussner Rodgers writes in the NY Times that a little-noticed change in the American workplace is about to occur. Later this month the Department of Labor is expected to announce an adjustment to the Fair Labor Standards Act raising the salary threshold for overtime from $23,660 per year to at least double that threshold. In 1975, the last year the threshold was significantly raised, 60 percent of salaried workers fell within the requirement for overtime pay while today, only 8 percent do. The new requirement should be a welcome change for millions of American workers.
But the change also speaks to an issue that affects everyone, whether eligible for overtime or not — the clash between the finite amount of time employees actually have versus the desire of employers to treat time as an inexhaustible resource. Employees in the United States currently work more hours than workers in any of the world's 10 largest economies except Russia. When everything over 40 hours is free to the employer, the temptation to demand more is almost irresistible. But for most employees, the ones exempt from overtime rules, their managers have little incentive to look for ways to use their time more efficiently. "We are a tired, stressed and overworked nation, which has many negative consequences for our personal health and the care of our children. As a nation, we work harder and longer than almost all of our competitors, and much of that work is uncompensated," writes Rodgers. "Time is our personal currency. We parcel it out, hour by hour, to meet the demands placed on us. We all pay a steep price, as individuals and as a nation, when we can't meet our most important obligations."
But the change also speaks to an issue that affects everyone, whether eligible for overtime or not — the clash between the finite amount of time employees actually have versus the desire of employers to treat time as an inexhaustible resource. Employees in the United States currently work more hours than workers in any of the world's 10 largest economies except Russia. When everything over 40 hours is free to the employer, the temptation to demand more is almost irresistible. But for most employees, the ones exempt from overtime rules, their managers have little incentive to look for ways to use their time more efficiently. "We are a tired, stressed and overworked nation, which has many negative consequences for our personal health and the care of our children. As a nation, we work harder and longer than almost all of our competitors, and much of that work is uncompensated," writes Rodgers. "Time is our personal currency. We parcel it out, hour by hour, to meet the demands placed on us. We all pay a steep price, as individuals and as a nation, when we can't meet our most important obligations."
Contrary to popular belief: The number of hours worked do not correspond to the amount of work done
Take programmers, for example - The output of top notch programmers are often many times than those of the coding monkeys
I have had the privileges to work with legendary programmers, I saw with my own eyes the things that they have produced and none of the ordinary coding monkeys can even come close
A lot of countries work longer hours:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The US doesn't even make the top 10. Whoever wrote that article decided to (whether deliberately or not) cherry pick and say "ok, let's just filter among the largest grossing economies" and not necessarily the highest GDP per capita or even population. I don't know what number the US is, but I have a feeling we aren't even top 15, because I know Japan and China should probably fit somewhere closely after 10th.
In fact China may very well be higher ranked than all of these, just it's hard to tell because a lot of Chinese workers like to work very long hours for a year or two and save their money the whole time, and after that is done they'll live off of their savings for an extended period (up to a year.) These are usually people who live in rural areas and get factory jobs far away from home, and then go back home once they've had enough. They'll do something like 16 hours a day for a year solid, with very few days off. A lot of the ultraleft union types call it worker abuse, but it's not, the laborers actually like doing it this way, and it actually pisses the laborers off when western media puts pressure on them to not do what they want to do. The way they circumvent that is to help their employer conceal how many hours they actually work to the western companies that ask, which makes getting actual useful data about it practically impossible.
Teachers' unions have been under brutal attack for over 30 years now and there are today very few teachers with "strong" union protection left. Cf Wisconsin. Some - although not a large percentage - of K-12 school districts have a concept called 'tenure' which is often confused with elite university tenure but in the K-12 world generally means "can't be fired without the firing party following HR procedures and going through an appeal process". Which doesn't mean much in the end either.
sPh
Overtime is not guaranteed for anybody classified as a professional -- and our last president decided to expand professional to include "anybody who who uses a computer for a primary function of their job." Smart companies who don't like to burn out workers will provide benefits like OT past 40 hours (or in your case, 44), and discourage work outside of business hours. Companies that see employees simply as Human "Resources," no different than copiers or PCs will often get as much as they can out of them without regard to efficiencies, health or happiness.
After the stock market crashed, I saw the shift at my own place of business. Positions were cut or not re-filled after retirements, and more and more workload was added to the job. The number of hours started creeping up -- slowly at first, but then as it happened it became normal then expected. Where we should have two full time shifts we have one. All the after-hours changes and maintenance work is done by those that work the day shifts. It's caused quite a few people in our department to look for new jobs.
I used to work at Intel, and they had a very strong, employee-focused approach at their jobs. They highly discouraged anything beyond 40 hours, and if you did (it happened every so often), we got paid. Projects that required additional resources generally got them either via temporary help or from others in the organization. Places like that do exist, but they are becoming rarer and rarer.
If you are in a " you're 1099 and here's your desk and working hours and no we're not paying you by the hour" situation then you need to file a grievance with the DOL and IRS. Trust me i work in an industry where we utilize contractors all the time, and i can promises you that they are violating the law, and you will win if you go after them (and the government will help you with that too). Sadly your "winnings" is usually that you are now a "employee" and the "employer" just fires you. But they end up paying a bunch of back taxes and fines/fees. So if you don't' like them and plan on leaving anyways, file a grievance.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I own a software company and my developers work 37 hour weeks (8 hrs. Mon-Thur and 5 hrs. on Fri). We don't allow work from home. We don't even allow them to check their email when they're off work. Work is work. Home is home. Our employees love the lighter schedule and I don't think we lose much (if any) productivity. Our competitors may even pay more, but I don't fear losing any of my employees.