91–98 of 98 posts
Why is the President making law in the first place? If this law was made by Congress, it would be less susceptible to legal challenge now, or reversal by a future administration.
The law gives the regulator the authority to determine who is exempt from overtime. This is not "making law", it is excersizing authority granted under existing law.
Earlier 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?
Lower earners (collectively) are not able to figure out the unintended consequences and happily support that populist rule.
I don't know how businesses get away without paying overtime. My life is finite. My work hours are finite. If you want more hours out of me, you pay for them.
In my country / province (Canada / Alberta), IT workers are considered professionals and as such we are overtime exempt while we in no way qualify as "high earners" compared to a lot of the surrounding vocations - is that the same where you are, or are we just getting a raw deal up here?
I prefer to work hourly rates, so that the moment I am asked to work overtime, I can just start charging for it. Unfortunately it's been a long time since I saw a contract here in Australia on anything other than a daily rate - so now, if I ever have to work overtime in a day, then I just make that up by working fewer hours the next. And then if asked to work weekends, then I charge per day for that, too.
I've never accepted the argument that because "professionals" get paid more that we're handing a blank cheque to employers to make us work as long as they like without extra pay. Doing so just reduces our effective hourly rate, in the long term.
TBH, I don't actually know how the law in Australia works regarding this, but it seems that employers can get away with not paying for overtime, if they want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a source for the judge's order: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/Overtime_-... I am not a lawyer, so I urge people to read the text and decide for themselves. Here's my analysis: In order to issue a preliminary injuction, the plaintiffs must present a "prima facie" case, essentially, a demonstration that they can win the case under the assumption that all their factual claims are true. First…
The meat of the ruling is on pages 12 & 13. The FLSA says "any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity . . . as such terms are defined and delimited from time to time by regulations” is exempt from overtime. The judge says that the minimum salary rule cannot be used to determine if an employee is exempt, even though the existing rule already uses minimum salary as a criter…
I don't know how businesses get away without paying overtime. My life is finite. My work hours are finite. If you want more hours out of me, you pay for them.
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.
You get a worker task, say add a button to your application, estimate it at 12h and schedule to start on Wednesday. Ok, Monday is release date. Then it turns out that the worker task actually takes more than 12h. And at the same time on Wednesday some computer/server breaks, which takes 12h to fix, so there are no slack hours this week. Basically you are left with extra X hours this week. Is this overtime? If you took afternoon off on Tuesday?
Another situation. You get a 2 hour maintenance window at 19:00 on Friday. If you get to leave 2 hours early, technically there is no overtime. But in practice your workday is 08:00-21:00 - 13 hours long on Friday.
This is the [moral] issue with yearly/monthly salary. Basically employee agrees to agree on task length estimates and then do those tasks, not much different from consultant agreeing on hourly rate and task list with estimates. And this is somewhat of a problem, because power dynamics usually favour employer and employee can be coerced to work unpaid overtime. It is easy to hourly bill production line workers, but it is much different with intellectual tasks where output is not fixed. Is watching the birds while you contemplate on the problem work or not? Maybe you start thinking about your pet parrot. A huge can of worms here. I would say that higher salaries (despite supply/demand, education, etc.) in intellectual fields are the effect of expected occasional overtime not vice versa.
If your employer takes your actual output as "best you can do" and in some way compensates for everything exceeding 40 weekly/8 daily hours I hope for them to succeed and expand so there are more places like that :)
Interesting 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?
(I've also known one or two places where they flat out told people to not report hours above a threshold and/or "mysteriously" deleted the overtime from the hours recorded, and the employees felt they couldn't report it to external authorities without getting fired.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I've had plenty of shitty jobs in my day, it was always a choice for me to take them and I was always glad to have them. I used to pull twelve hour shifts on a production line. Did that job for three weeks to save up to move across the country. You always have options. You can always make a plan. If the plan fails, you learn from it and make a better one. But I tell you what, I'd rather have a shit job as an option r…
That's always the case with any kind of blackmail.