1. Having annual components to wages (RSUs, bonuses), making you work all year and firing you just before they have to pay you.
2. Having no overtime for salaried employees
3. Having employees work extra responsibilities that are not part of the job description by promising promotions and then not giving it to them
I'm on salary, and I'm only expected to get the work done that's on my plate, and respond to emails etc within a reasonable time frame (eg, if I get an email at 4pm on a Friday, and I don't respond to it till 11:30am Monday, that's fine so long as it's not an emergency).
If I get my work done and there's still time in the day, I'm not expected to invent busywork for myself.
But I do recognize that I'm extremely lucky to have the kind of conditions I do here.
I've never encountered such a system in my 20+ years being paid a salary. What companies do this? Worked for two European firms (including one very large one) and two large American firms during that time. Is it something small companies try to do?
What companies have you been at in 20+ years that you have not experienced it at?
Overtime and various other hourly worker protections led to more and more work being classified as salaried, and with it, a removal of the “perks” for most salaried people.
Generally the primary perk that still follows salaried work though is the concept of vacation, sick time, and benefits albeit rationed and beancounted now.
Or even worse, instating mandatory unpaid overtime.
I would love to see Pagerduty stats by job and position. I'm pretty sure the number of devs on 24/7 rotations is way higher than it should.
This is just the definition of "salaried employee".
So while the legal definition is true that I get paid a fixed amount "regardless of work hours" the societal expectation is that I'll meet the 40 hours, 40+ makes me a "work hard, play hard", and everything under is me being lazy regardless of whether I hit my productivity goals or not.
I once closed my Microsoft Teams off 15 minutes earlier than the expected and my manager was telling me to inform her next time that I'm leaving, and I work from home. Micromanaging at its finest.
This is particularly true for workers whose jobs are computer based. Companies think they can pay one shift of workers to keep the computers running 24/7. It should not be that way.
If a company wants its computing infrastructure running 24/7 it should pay for 3 shifts of workers. If not then shut down the systems at 5pm like any normal business.
Email/IM should also be disabled for workers who aren't actively on shift. Any expectation of monitoring email/IM/phone should be counted as work that requires payment and for which there is a maximum number of allowed hours a week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003
NB a lot of employers will ask you to sign a contract self-excluding you from its protections on your first day. ("it's not mandatory, we'd just like everyone to sign it :)" )
Over a year later, they were still "ramping up". Not a single interview had taken place, to the best of my knowledge.
Surely if I'm doing my work in much less and stop working, I'm stealing. When I'm waking up at 2am to handle an incident and still have to clock in the day after, "that's part of the job".
Favors only go one way
Plenty of good examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22time+theft%22+us
Everyone is eligible for overtime if they're paid hourly. Certain classes of jobs are exempt from overtime if they're salaried. For example, an Amazon warehouse can't make a picker salaried and then demand free overtime hours.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime/fact-sheets has the breakdown of can be overtime exempt. As a couple of examples, blue-collar workers and first responders can not, in general, be overtime exempt.
The company released the contract and he was put on the bench working for the contracting firm on their projects. They would pay him once per month. They fired him after a few months, not pay him is back pay.
He filed a claim with Texas, nothing was done. When he told me (a year or 2 later) I said he should file with the Federal Gov, but he did not want to.
So it can happen in office work too.
I'm self-employed and have made it a standard practice to look up court records on any new client I'm considering to take on. It has been eye opening.
The problem comes with laying people off in December prior to bonuses. You’ve taken a year of work under the presence of a bonus compensation and then yanked the rug out after squeezing every last ounce of work from a year. They could of course just not pay a bonus, but often internal compensation guidance requires proving a fireable performance problem while layoffs just require basic reporting to labor departments.
Calling this theft is extreme, but it’s definitely ripping employees off and treating them badly. The imprudence mismatch is that the employee is much less able to afford the shenanigans than the employer benefits, and a year of an employees career is a much larger share of total lifetime earnings than the corporations benefit as a percentage of its total lifetime revenues (or compensation expenses as the case may be). This makes it wrong, but not illegal.
Get it in writing so you can sue later, or don’t ever count on it. It’s basic business skills.
Job offers are often take it or leave it, because of the inherent power dynamics in the industry. These “basic business skills” will essentially leave you out of a job.
Your claim is that any crime where the evidence is destroyed isn't a crime.
I once heard a judge say "An oral contract is worth the paper it is printed on".
It may be enforceable if there is a bunch of corroborating evidence that multiple people were told this and are willing to testify in court to that case. But you'll find, especially in right to work states, getting people to speak against the company is difficult.