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Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

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Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#61

Post by atomicnumber3 »

nouveaux wrote: post #54
adrr wrote: post #38

Start sending manager and hr to jail for wage theft. If an employee falsified timesheets they can and have been convicted of theft. Why isn’t the reverse true? Jail is a huge motivating factor and why you don’t see wide spread accounting fraud in public companies.

That's probably not a path you want to go down. Do we start putting employees in jail for wage theft?

Yes, at appropriate levels. I worked in several regulated financial institutions. Every year it was part of compliance training to be reminded that if you notice, for instance, money laundering or financial fraud, you can be personally liable and go to jail.

This isn't a new concept at all. Professional engineers have similar levels of risk if they breach ethics, though I don't know if it's criminal or just self regulatory and civil.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#62

Post by lp0_on_fire »

Xeoncross wrote: post #58
adrr wrote: post #38

Start sending manager and hr to jail for wage theft. If an employee falsified timesheets they can and have been convicted of theft. Why isn’t the reverse true? Jail is a huge motivating factor and why you don’t see wide spread accounting fraud in public companies.

No, you should quit instead. Making offering not enough money to someone a criminal offense sounds like a dangerous ground to stand on.

It's not about "offering" enough money it's about companies that are deliberately classifying employees as "managers" when they're anything but for the purposes of avoiding having to pay the employees overtime.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#63

Post by watwut »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #24
nowherebeen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People outside the finance industry really buy it too. I think it's because in most companies, VPs are above director. Only in finance, is it below.

> I think it's because in most companies, VPs are above director. Every now and again someone whose spent a career exclusively in finance gets bitten by this when transitioning into the business world. A friend once told me a story about a deal with Amazon nearly getting tanked when I coworker chewed out an Amazon VP, saying they wanted to "talk to someone who could make decisions". Took a lot of massaging to salvage…

Enjoyable to imagine this. The ex finance people I work with are quite toxic towards those lower on hierarchy. Cool to hear about someone being bitten by it for once.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#64

Post by lostlogin »

Xeoncross wrote: post #58
adrr wrote: post #38

Start sending manager and hr to jail for wage theft. If an employee falsified timesheets they can and have been convicted of theft. Why isn’t the reverse true? Jail is a huge motivating factor and why you don’t see wide spread accounting fraud in public companies.

No, you should quit instead. Making offering not enough money to someone a criminal offense sounds like a dangerous ground to stand on.

It’s not about offering, it’s about having done it.

If an employees took the same amount of money it would be theft, so illegally not paying that amount is a very similar crime.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#65

Post by Xeoncross »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #62
Xeoncross wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you should quit instead. Making offering not enough money to someone a criminal offense sounds like a dangerous ground to stand on.

It's not about "offering" enough money it's about companies that are deliberately classifying employees as "managers" when they're anything but for the purposes of avoiding having to pay the employees overtime.

It's just semantics, you're not compelled to stay and work for someone who is low-balling you.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#66

Post by Georgelemental »

bmitc wrote: post #39
hourago wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner. Unionization is a great way of solving disputes. Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization. To put violence and unions at the same level seems uncalled for.

A lot of unions directly block solving disputes, choosing instead to deny all disputes. I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. These were the type of workers that would keep government equipment after retiring, quitting, or rarely being fired, requiring the government to send of…

Generally I am more suspicious of public sector unions than private. The power of private sector unions is counterbalanced by the profit motive of the company; meanwhile governments are often perfectly happy wasting a fortune in taxpayer dollars.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#67

Post by zokier »

> Generally, companies are required to pay workers one-and-a-half times their hourly rate anytime they work more than 40 hours in a week. But there's an exemption for salaried managers, who receive the same amount of pay each week, as long as they earn above a certain minimum amount.

Somehow I feel the companies are not the problem here. That exemption is pretty ridiculous to have in the first place. Regardless of these "fake" managers, why don't "real" managers deserve OT pay?

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#68

Post by jdmichal »

ajmurmann wrote: post #30
gitfan86 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited is such an absurd word. It should be "Flexible". It should be we will NOT fire you if you take 23.5 days instead of the ideal number of 22. Also, if you take 18 that is not a problem either.

It's not "flexible" either. It's "non-accrued". The only reason it's non-accrued is so that the company doesn't have to pay you left over PTO when you leave the company and gets it off their books. Everything else is a euphemism to make employees feel good about getting fewer benefits. You could have this flexibility with accrued PTO. I've previously given employees additional, off-the-books time off because they nee…

My second job, I agreed on a start date having forgotten that I had a week-long cruise booked for the very next week. It had been arranged a year or so before by a friend and just was not on my mind. So I started week 3 of that job with a -40 hour PTO balance.

Companies have a lot of flexibility in deciding how the accruals work. But, as you said, the important part is that when it accrues, at that point it's a legally-obligated right for you to either receive that time or be paid for it.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#69

Post by AlbertCory »

ceejayoz wrote: post #50
AlbertCory wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the answers excuse this as "only a VP has signing authority." That probably accounts for some of the VP titles. I kinda doubt that all the VPs in your average BofA office are always signing things, and couldn't possibly just go to their boss for a signature, like normal people do.

I was under the impression it was partially a client relations thing; "Oh, I'm talking to a vice president of the bank! I must be important!"

Right. Part of the ego boost of the title.

Re: Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles

#70

Post by jcadam »

Was once a senior engineer at a small-ish office of a fairly large company. We had a particularly high-strung junior engineer that was prone to throwing fits if he didn't get his way.

Apparently, one day, he threatened to quit for another offer. He was placated with some trivial pay increase and promotion to lead engineer (essentially leap-frogging the other seniors in the office in title - but not in pay).

Except no announcement was made; I had no idea he'd been promoted. One day he walks into my office and starts telling me I need to redesign some module using XYZ Design pattern.

"Nope, don't think so - that would be a pointless and unnecessary complication and we have a release on Friday."

"No, you need to do it. I already talked to the Engineering Manager."

I can't remember exactly what I said next, but it wasn't very nice.*

Then I'm getting called into the Engineering Manager's office: "Can you just do the thing he asked you to do, please? I know, I know... we kinda have to humor him on this."

* - of course I remember what I said, and it definitely wasn't nice.

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