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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Having no overtime for salaried employees

This is just the definition of "salaried employee".

The whole idea of salary is ridiculous. The FLSA needs to be fixed so that forcing workers to work 24/7 is explicitly banned.

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.

See the European Working Time Directive for a good example of how this can be enacted.

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 :)" )

Yup. Used to work as an SRE, we were on-call 24/7 for PagerDuty (which, thankfully, wasn't horrific, but...). The company was "ramping up" for three shifts/follow-the-sun/whatever.

Over a year later, they were still "ramping up". Not a single interview had taken place, to the best of my knowledge.

Got off the banning of crap, leave people choice. Most teams I’ve been on have had the option to control our own on call schedule. And every time we’ve picked 24/7 less often instead of “follow the sun” more often.

I'm salaried, my contract says that I owe them 37.5h a week.

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

There's a term Employers use: "time theft". For the time that employees were paid for but didn't do work.

Plenty of good examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22time+theft%22+us

I’ve never “had to clock in the day after” without taking my own time to make up for after hours calls. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky but seems obvious to me. Usually managers will say “take the day off” if the night was bad.

Not saying that I disagree with the definition but most companies aren't happy when I have to leave the office earlier to visit a doctor and will expect me to work until the 40 hours are met.

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.

Right, but it’s still wage theft when you make people work twice as much because they’re “salaried”.

How are they "made"? These are highly paid employees earning market rates.

I think you're saying that salaried employees are exempt from overtime, which is not true (in the 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.

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