The timing of this is intriguing. Pretty much last minute change. I do a lot of accounting & payroll consulting work (not in the US), but I see on a lot of forums that consultants in the US are panicking because they have spent weeks getting their client systems ready for the change, and now they have to maybe undo all of that in short order.
Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand it for higher earners. You are well compensated, typically better conditions and have employment options should the enviroment become toxic. For lower pays absolutely. If an employers agrees to X contracted hours/rate and then demands X+ hours because they know you cant say no, this is essentially theft. And to not pass this as rule essentially mandates it as OK. I hope this gets sorted. I suspect th…
> I can understand it for higher earners What's the cutoff that determines when someone is classified as a higher earner?
There should be no cutoff. it's either paid for all (as it should be) or for none. How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always read "getting my work done" as similar to "pulling my own weight" or "doing my fair share." They're not supposed to be read literally, only to convey an overall sentiment. When I managed my team, work was never assigned to an individual. It was assigned to the team and the team took responsibility for it. Individuals accepted responsibility for pieces of work as they completed prior work. If an individual…
Then if the team works hard (say, they're superhuman and can work 24 hours a day 7 days a week straight) and do what other teams do in 3 months in one, will they get the other two off? If not, you're just pushing responsibility up.
Not exactly, but a similar situation happened with my team.
There was a period where we simply accomplished a lot more than other teams. It wasn't superhuman effort, which isn't sustainable. Instead, it was better tool selection and streamlined processes (automation and continuous delivery, which shed a lot of the baggage that comes with large releases) that accounted for most of the increase in productivity. In fact, my team worked less hours and had fewer production issues than other teams.
The organization (eventually) reacted the way that healthy organizations should...they promoted most of the team into leadership roles in other teams that weren't performing as well. The reward for our success was more money and responsibility and the entire organization benefited from what we'd learned.
I say eventually, because I had to fight a pretty big PR battle before management above me saw the virtue of the way that my team operated. Before that, there was a tendency to give star performer awards and kudos to people putting in long hours to make release deadlines or putting in heroic efforts to keep error-prone production environments up an running. Management saw my team leaving at a normal time every day and didn't think that was worth rewarding. It took a mountain of data for me to show that a boring, predictable production environment that allowed us to push out more features was better serving customers.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#54Interesting unintended consequences with this - my sister-in-law had her job hours radically shifted to deal with this rule - and not in a good way that she appreciated.
Would you mind explaining the shift change in more detail? Did the employer hire more in order to lower everyone's hours below the overtime limit?
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can understand it for higher earners What's the cutoff that determines when someone is classified as a higher earner?
There should be no cutoff. it's either paid for all (as it should be) or for none. How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?
>How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?
The same way we say that people must have less stuff, including health care, college for their kids, etc., because they earn less.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand it for higher earners. You are well compensated, typically better conditions and have employment options should the enviroment become toxic. For lower pays absolutely. If an employers agrees to X contracted hours/rate and then demands X+ hours because they know you cant say no, this is essentially theft. And to not pass this as rule essentially mandates it as OK. I hope this gets sorted. I suspect th…
It is not the role of the judiciary to define what is just of unjust: they just need to make a ruling based on the law. There is really no difference if someone is paid $20k or $90k: you always must discount that rate if you are not an hourly employee. It is not theft: it is at-will employment and nobody is being forced to take it. Also, the ruling is only being postponed: --- “Due to the approaching effective date o…
>It is not theft: it is at-will employment and nobody is being forced to take it.
That's a strange view of how the world works. But of course if one has never been forced to take a shitty job because they just have no options, one can hold such a view more easily.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can understand it for higher earners What's the cutoff that determines when someone is classified as a higher earner?
There should be no cutoff. it's either paid for all (as it should be) or for none. How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?
"How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?"
It's not that they have 'less rights' - it's that the expectations of the job are different. You're a CEO, you're going to have to 'work a ton of hours' for your massive paycheque, it just goes with the job. You don't want it - stay VP or Director, or manager.
CEO's, doctors etc. are not commodities.
For hourly unskilled workers, 'labour' etc - there always have to be protections. Without them - we head back to 19th century oppression.
I understand that's it's nuanced, and I agree that 'some salary' is a really, really crude way to define it ... but something needs to be there, or else you get 1/3 of Americans working 80 hours a week for de-facto $4/hour.
Make no mistake - the 'free market wage' for 1/3 of Americans who's skills are commoditized, but who nevertheless to 'valuable work' is basically 1% above 'survival'. Well below poverty. You could argue the 'free market' decides how much value they actually provide, but I would argue that the rate is entirely a function of relative power disparity between the two parties (employee v. big corp) and nothing more. It's why 'minimum wage' laws exist in most places. 'Free markets' work when actors have agency, and some power ... when actors don't have some degree of power-parity, 99% of the surpluses go into the hands of one side of the equation.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#58Interesting unintended consequences with this - my sister-in-law had her job hours radically shifted to deal with this rule - and not in a good way that she appreciated.
On election day Santa Clara county approved Measure E, which requires any business above a certain number of employees to offer additional work hours to existing part-time employees before hiring more part-time employees. The idea being to make it illegal for a company to just keep hiring more and more part-timers to avoid ever giving someone enough hours to become full-time.
I suspect if the overtime rule sticks around we'll see similar measures pop up for it.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. I kind of like being exempt. If I get my work done early and I decide the take the afternoon off, my paycheck is the same. That said I'm lucky and my company freely comps additional paid time off when I start working more than 40 hours per week.
People talk about "getting their work done" as if an equal amount of work were doled out every day to each worker and getting it done were a "you eat what you kill" result of being highly productive. Is this work-assignment principle common? I could see why a manager might distribute work this way, but I've never seen it actually happen -- it has always been "oh great, you finished early today, you'll have twice as m…
I work at a digital agency, in many ways I am a cog in a ticket processing pipeline. We have an endless stream of tickets. If one gets done there is another waiting, there is no reason not to be working. It is a bit of a bummer, as a lifestyle. But makes total sense as a business. This isn't a school where the goal is learning and assignments are the method. The assignments are the goal and there is enough for months of work, I already know how to do them, so there is no reason not to.
I yearn for something a bit different, I don't feel like an endless stream of 100% work is healthy. But the only way for that to be different is for the business to actively say "yes, we would like to make less revenue so that you can do something that isn't what we pay you for"
The realistic scenario is that I work fewer hours and get paid less. Which is fine, and lines up nicely with the meritocracy rhetoric. But I can't help but feel like the work 40 hours, eat, sleep, die method of employment is a slight perversion of life.
Re: Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
People talk about "getting their work done" as if an equal amount of work were doled out every day to each worker and getting it done were a "you eat what you kill" result of being highly productive. Is this work-assignment principle common? I could see why a manager might distribute work this way, but I've never seen it actually happen -- it has always been "oh great, you finished early today, you'll have twice as m…
I've always read "getting my work done" as similar to "pulling my own weight" or "doing my fair share." They're not supposed to be read literally, only to convey an overall sentiment. When I managed my team, work was never assigned to an individual. It was assigned to the team and the team took responsibility for it. Individuals accepted responsibility for pieces of work as they completed prior work. If an individual…
How does someone in hospitality or retail "get their work done and go home early"? How do you staff a cash register so assiduously that you get to knock off early?