US Senator Proposes Bill To Eliminate Overtime For IT Workers 1167
New submitter Talisman writes "Kay Hagan (D) from North Carolina has introduced a bill to the Senate that would eliminate overtime pay for IT workers."
The bill is targeted at salaried IT employees and those whose hourly rate is $27.63 or more. It seems comprehensive in its description of what types of IT work qualify — everything from analysis and consulting to design and development to training and testing. The bill even uses "work related to computers" as one of the guidelines.
Hurray.. ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hurray, no more working late!
Wait.. they still expect people to work without being compensated for their late hours?
Did EA send out lobbyists again with briefcases full of money?
All About The Unions (Score:3, Insightful)
This would effectively make unions the only options for such workers.
Fucking scam artists.
Simple solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
8 hours work for 8 hours pay.
Don't work for free, people. After all, you're just an employee to them, not a BFF.
I recently saw a guy who had worked at my current place of work get given the shove after nearly 20 years. Escorted him out of the building and everything. He sat in the pub blubbing like a baby and asking how they could be so cruel after everything he'd given them.
I've vowed never to work a minute past what I'm contracted to do, and if I have to I simply come in late the next day.
Re:Hurray.. ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I think we all understand that, if hard choices have to be made, everybody likes a team player, yes?
I'd support this ... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is madness (Score:5, Insightful)
$27.63 seems oddly specific
But with the amount of overtime pay in the IT community someone will pretty soon realize that unless people actually sometime work overtime to fix problems it won't be long before people start cutting up old tires to make body armour.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Yes if you pick up your smartphone and answer an IT question after hours you most certainly did work overtime. If it is after hours.. work is OVER. and you took TIME to work.
Re:All About The Unions (Score:5, Insightful)
Michael Bennet [D-CO]
Scott Brown [R-MA]
Michael Enzi [R-WY]
John Isakson [R-GA]
Are in the pocket of big labor, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Now, in the broader sense of Nikolay Chernyshevsky's "The worse, the better" theory of what actually drives the poor to organize and/or unionize and/or devour the rich in an orgy of redistributive bloodletting, they may actually be more effective labor leaders than most actual labor leaders; but not in the direct sense...
Re:Simple solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen brother.
I only take hourly paying jobs now. That salary shit wont fly with me.
I tried it once and it was the worst mistake I ever made.
Went from a 60k/yr hourly contract to a 48K salary position with supposedly similar pay in the form of A+ benefits like a 0% copay medical (yes zero) and free legal care and the list goes on.
I went from working 40hrs and getting regular overtime easily bringing 2400 after taxes every two weeks, to working 50-60 hour weeks with absolutely no recognition for $1450 twice a month.
The job lasted 4 months before I got the hell out of there back into a 70K hourly contract. FUCK THAT.
Solution to a non-existent problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't most IT workers exempt anyway? (Not that I think they necessarily should be, but still.)
Re:Simple solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I used to be a nut case, working 12 and 15 hour days for weeks on end... then I realized that morons who were producing shitty code and working 6 hour days + 2 hour lunches were getting the same promotions and pay increases I was, so that was a ME problem, not a THEM problem. ME is easier to fix than THEM.
8 hours work, 8 hours pay, pure and simple. Don't kill yourself over your job. If you love coding, join an open source project and contribute freely to the world, not your employer's pocket -- he/she probably doesn't care that you're working 12 hours -- you're being used.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does this make sense for govn't.. isn't this a Private sector issue?
It *is* a private sector issue. You see, people who wanted to pay less for IT guys bribed these senators to pass this bill. The senators rubbed their hands together and agreed. Now they each have a new car.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:4, Insightful)
No, there is only a semantic difference.
If they're not required to pay overtime, none will pay overtime.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:1, Insightful)
No, the person he was responding to just said they were going to vote "THEM" out of office. The story submitter is the one who pointed out that it was a Democrat who submitted it - JustNiz was pointing out that it wasn't a party based bill, but a "particular idiots" bill. If anyone's a blithering tool here AC, it's you. But then, since you were totally OK with them getting slammed based on party when it was only a Democrat, and only got angry once it was pointed out that Republicans were also involved, you're probably just another tea-bagger moron.
Re:Hurray.. ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep! That's why I play for the winning team. And the winning team treats employees with respect and therefore gets a quality 8 hours of work out of them. The losing team has me working for 16 hours and gets 6 hours of quality work + 10 hours of web surfing from me.
Which team is your company on?
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are doing work, you should get paid for it. Period.
If your employer wants to cheap out and go with "on call" instead of real staffing, they still get to pay for your labor.
Re:Why IT workers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Congress's Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
But that is work done beyond your normal 8 hours. Are you saying, that if the boss calls you 24 hours at day at home, he doesn't have to pay you even though your extending your expertise? Fuck that, these supports calls can go on an hour often multiple of times. You basically be working several (often large amount of) hours for free. Why shouldn't they get paid for the thing support they give, which is much like what they do normally at their job. You obviously never worked in most IT environments. Excessive offcalls is extremely common and time consuming (something much more then the job itself).
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:4, Insightful)
So....what? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this different than the plight of software engineers, hardware engineers, or designers that work outside of the IT industry? How is it different than the legions of R&D folks that are listed as exempt employees?
I'm not saying it should happen. Far from it. But the real battle is that technical professions all over have been moved to exempt status and their employees continue to be forced to work exceedingly long days for 8 hours of pay. It's not the IT guidelines that need reform, it's the ones for all technical professions.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does this make sense for govn't.. isn't this a Private sector issue?
It's a government issue because the government defines what overtime means in the first place.
If it were purely left up to the private sector, people would still be routinely working 12 hour shifts 7 days per week for base wages, like they did in the 19th century before governments got involved.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Most individuals suck at negotiating. This is a large part of the reason Unions were born in the first place.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you think that lawyers don't bill you when you call them?
Re:Screw this Senator (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a lot of us, like you, that care about the quality of our work. To think
they can legislate something that actually should be between an individual and
his employer just proves we need to get over this "party" crap and start demanding
an IQ test of our politicians.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it isn't just a semantic difference if there's a contract involved, and the contract stipulates time and a half for overtime. Would it invalidate the contract?
Oh, and BTW, you guys need to unionize (I'm out of the fight, I retire in 2 years). And a thought just occurred to me -- if I were required to work overtime at my normal rate, I'd just refuse to work overtime. Fuck 'em.
The God Damned 1% and their congressional stooges are still trying to remove the American workers' rights that have been fought for, and in many cases died for them [wikipedia.org].
Too bad assassination is immoral and illegal. But despite the fact that it is, these greedy Godless bastards had damned well better watch their backs. If they don't loosen up, there's going to be violence (see the link for a short history).
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
why does congress hate free markets? (Score:5, Insightful)
IT workers propose bill requiring citizen referendum on any congressional pay raises
Tempest in a teapot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hurray.. ? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're salaried. You're paid to do a job, whether it takes you 20 hours or 80 hours a week. If you want, I'll pay you an extra 50% of your hourly wage when you work more than 40 hours a week. Your hourly wage is $0/hour, here's $0.
I'm done! I can go home early, right?
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:4, Insightful)
Proof: I get four weeks paid vacation.
Here in the UK that's apparently the legal minimum.
Signs of my employer being generous are that I get 7.5% of my salary paid into my pension plan. It was 5% last year, but they put it up this year for some reason.
Re:Karl Marx nailed this one (Score:5, Insightful)
He wasn't "predicting" anything. He was merely describing what was already going on then.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say you're naive. The "free market" (i.e. heavily tilted in favor of large companies) would settle on a wage that isn't quite enough to pay your rent and groceries, much less Internet access. How does a schedule of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sound? That's what the "free market" used to offer, back before employment law came into being.
It was great for the owners of large companies, but it sucked for the 99%.
Re:I'm no democrat but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...this is still surprising to see this coming from someone with a D after their name. This is not because they are fundamentally more decent, but their usual constituency doesn't really seem to buy the "blame the middle class" argument, at least not as much. This seems like a really, really dumb idea, if for no other reason than the political fallout it will create.
Don't know about this one, but several Democrats are indistinguishable from Republicans - other than the 'D' after their name.
Re:This is not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
2 scenarios here. 1. If a doctor is given a pager and informed that he must come in when it beeps, he should be compensated if it beeps and he has to come in
2. If a doctor is working clinic duty, Feels concerned for a patient, and gives her his celphone number, and says "If you have any concerns call me", and that patient calls him for advice on her toe fungus, he should not be compensated as that is a favor he volunteered to do, without being told by the hospital to do so.
Re:Why IT workers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Calling BS or dinosaur (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously,
How old are you? 67
McDonald's has to pay a full time worker $15,080
($7.25 min. wage * 40 hours * 52 weeks)
So I'd wager when you made $13K, you were either part time. Or this was a very long time ago. When you could buy a car for $6,000 instead of $20,000.
I propose that IT workers simply stop work at 40hr (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:4, Insightful)
True...
Because homeless people tend to have poor attendance records. And while minimum wage has been going up. American worker's wages in relation to buying power and value of the dollar have been continually moving downward.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Most individuals suck at negotiating. This is a large part of the reason Unions were born in the first place.
It's not so much that most individuals suck at negotiating (which may be true), but that corporations usually have much more leverage. A corporation can say, "well, we have 100 other applicants, so we'll find someone who is more desperate than you," while the individual could be facing homelessness if they don't find a job within the next few months. You'd have to be an extraordinary negotiator to get a good deal in that situation.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Particularly in IT, you can't just bring in part timers to bridge the gap when you need more work done than your current staff can accomplish in 40 hours. Sometimes it takes a month or more to bring a new guy up to speed.
The reason they have mandatory time and a half rules is because typically the lower you are on the hourly wage scale, the more badly you need the job, and the easier you are to replace. Without this, companies would just demand 80 hours or more from their employees rather than hiring new employees. Each employee has a fixed cost, so one person doing 80 hours work is a higher profit than two employees each doing 40 hours work at the same salary. If you don't agree to that work schedule, they'll replace you, and soon all jobs in your skill range require this.
The point is to incentivize employers to maintain a reasonable work/life balance for their employees, while not totally crippling them when there's a short term work load glut. Time and a half over 40 hours strikes me as a particularly good balance. Many hourly workers are happy to have the bonus pay at that rate, while employers are typically willing to pay it since this work glut represents unusual profitability on their part. If you're consistently paying 20 hours of overtime, then you probably should increase the size of your work force.
Unfortunately most IT jobs are already overtime exempt. At first I misread the title and though, "About time they made non-IT managers eligible for overtime!" What I mentioned above about unreasonable work schedules is pretty true in many corners of the industry. If you're a software tester or software engineer, chances are you have felt pressured to donate time to the company on a regular basis. Each extra hour they can squeeze out of you just increases their ROI on your salary, so they're incentivized to find the highest number of hours they can convince their workforce to commit. In many shops, you'll be consistently found to be under-producing if you go home before 10 or 12 hours, and you may be let go as a result.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree to some degree...
I believe that the time and half vs exempt employees has created a caste of worker who is now forced to work for free. IT, salaried, then gets stuck working 50-60 hours or more.
Let's say an IT worker is salaried at $100,000 ($48/hr) for a 40 hour work week. But more often than not said IT worker is working 60 hours a week. They lost the other network engineer and the economy is too challenging to hire a replacement. Said IT worker's true salary is actually only $66,666. Or about 2/3 of their reported salary.
Even at 50 hours, it's an equiv to $38/hr, or $80K.
Meanwhile, the non-salaried worker with overtime who works 50 hours a week. Will earn $80K on a mere $28/hr pay rate. And a $100K on a mere $35/hr rate.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does (fake) party affiliation mean anything. I did not call him out for being a Democrat. I called him out for being a moron.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, does this mean that a company CAN'T pay them overtime or that they're NOT REQUIRED to pay them overtime? There's a big difference.
It's not even that. It's just clarifying that IT workers that make at least $27.63 an hour are explicitly defined as "exempt" under FLSA instead of "non-exempt". If you're a non-exempt employee, FLSA requires your employer to pay you time-and-a-half overtime whenever you work more than 40 hours in a work week. Often exempt employees are paid their regular rate as overtime, sometimes if you're salaried you don't get any.
This really just codifies the way employers have been classifying IT workers anyway, and avoids a lot of court cases.
Re:You have got (Score:4, Insightful)
Newt Gingrich made 1.8Million consulting after he left office for a job where he can't even remember what he did. Do you really think these people need the salary they get for being in Congress?
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't help but notice how nobody from California, the most populous and technology influential state - where making $27/hr is actually a poverty pay rate, considering the cost of living.
I'd really like to know why government believes it needs to stick its nose into this industry - it should be working diligently to remove lobbyists from DC.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Plead the 27th (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the ammo box is the next box. You gun fetishists had your chance 10 years ago, but you never did anything. Now even with your arsenals you're easily outgunned by the military, police and national guard, who have been trained since then in fighting urban, suburban and rural militias. Lately the police have been out clubbing your fellow citizens, and will only increase the firepower to "mass lethal" when the "problem people" start fighting back.
You didn't use the soap box, the jury box or the ballot box to do anything but keep your fetish objects close. In fact you used all of them to give power to the people who have run the country into the ground.
You're never going to use your guns to fight the government. All your actions have proven otherwise, every time.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you love it when a bill has bi partisan support. How else would we get fantastic bills like this one, the patriot act, and SOPA?
When is everyone gonna wake up to the fact that there are no parties anymore. Elephant or Donkey is irrelevant. The only thing that influences our government representatives, Republican or Democrat, is who happens to be paying them the best on a given issue.
I keep thinking of a scene from the movie Moon Over Parador [imdb.com]. 2 guys are discussing who they're going to vote for where the choices are blue or red. One says, "Vote for whoever you want. It's a free dictatorship." The government of the United States no longer represents the people. It represents the corporate interests that pay them the best. The constitution has been trampled so bad it's pretty much immaterial at this point. The fact that a blatant censorship bill like SOPA/PROTECT IP can even be considered is proof of that.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plead the 27th (Score:3, Insightful)
Now all we need to do is get term limits on those bastards so the next Congress isn't made up of the same people on the current Congress.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
If government didn't stick its nose into this kind of business interference, businesses wouldn't need to lobby government about the kind of interference. When government no longer sees itself as limited, then businesses and others have to form lobbies in order to try to protect themselves from the government.
Waddaminite.
Your theory is that if we didn't regulate business so much, then they wouldn't seek government protection?
Here's my theory. Businesses spend money where they see a potential return on investment. If they think they can use money to increase profitability, they'll do so. Nothing wrong with it. That's Capitalism. That's the American Way. Spending money to get favorable legislation is just a particular case. Businesses have done it since there have been businesses and governments.
One of the reasons government expands is because businesses successfully lobby for legislation they think will increase profitability.
Here in California we had the IT industry pushing hard for increases in H1B visas, so they could recruit from off-shore. Even as the dot-com bubble was dying they were still going for it, despite the streets filling with IT professionals of all skills and levels of ability. I attended a "job fair" and found over 300 people applying for one job, not even a very good job, but a job all the same. What IT industry and employers of IT people are looking for is government regulation of people, not the businesses. Disgusting is the best word for it.
Re:Plead the 27th (Score:5, Insightful)
Your area has more people with guns than the million people in the US military, plus the millions more in the National Guard, the State Police, the state's various municipal, county and local police?
Yes, you are living in a fantasy world. A world from the 1780s, where the locals could have the same firepower and skill as the government forces, instead of little gangs facing satellite guided helicopter, plane and drone bombings and strafings, tank batallions, poison gas... Where the government forces were all from a foreign country, in terrain with no roads, mostly not populated, no databases of political affiliations...
Yes, you are living in a Teabagger fantasy world if you think the many armed Americans have any chance against the actually armed to the teeth military that's been just fine with fighting wars against "guerrillas" for many continuous decades, holding the countries in question under their power even when they're outnumbered there thousands to one by people who want them out.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what has government ever done for us?
Limits for everyone! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
But since your glasses seem to be so rosy you might as well add: Oppression, Theft, False Imprissonment, Cover ups, Corruption, and Collusion to the list.
Any of those things I mentioned could happen in the private sector too, but you seemed to imply that the government was the only way those "good" things could come about and managed to leave out all the extra items that are "bad". I've added the "baddies" and readily admit the private sector could be involved with some of the same.
I'll be interested to see if if you can admit that the private sector could just of easily handled your list of goodies... It's okay if you can't. I'm just curious.
Re:I am planning to move to NC (Score:5, Insightful)
"How is this legal"
Good question: This sure smells like a bill of atainder, which is specifically forbidden under the constitution... It identifies a group of people and punishes them arbitrarily by stripping them of overtime because "why should those geeks get overtime?"
Want to see what happens when the people who make your iPhone "work," your electrical grid function, and your business applications process transactions get pissed off and band together? Thought not.
Yet it's horse-shit like this that leads to people in critical positions unionizing... Keep chiseling away, cutting salaries and outsourcing, and see what happens.
Re:Plead the 27th (Score:5, Insightful)
No, my complaint is not that "you wackos didn't just start shooting up the place".
It's that you wackos just having the guns was no deterrent, though you claimed it would be.
It's that you wackos claimed that when the government started damaging our rights despite the deterrent, you'd actually start showing more than "I'm the NRA and I vote" bumper stickers. You claimed you'd show up with guns, presumably as reasonable and orderly but opposed to the damage. You never did anything of the sort. Instead, you wackos voted for the people who scared you with "confiscate your guns" boogeyman stories about liberals, then damaged our rights.
And even the few real hardcore wackos you run of the mill wackos implied would actually just start shooting up the place never did. Because you're the kind of wackos who don't care about freedom - you care about having guns, shooting them, and scaring regular people. The authorities are your kind of guys.
I'm not complaining that you wackos never did any of those things because I wanted you wackos to do them. I'm complaining because you cowards were lying about it all. Which flooded the country with guns, which gets more people shot, without the promised deterrent to crimes high and low. And which gives the cops the excuse to treat Americans like our soldiers treat Iraqis and Afghans. All while voting for the people who damaged the freedoms you said you'd protect, if only you had completely wacko access to guns.
This is like when people complain when the "family values" Republicans you voted for, who demagogue against gay people and for the drug war, turn up with a gay whore and a bag of meth. It's not the drugs or the paid gay sex that most of us complain about. It's that they got the power to do that by stopping others from doing it, by lying against being against it. With guns, it's how you lie about being against damaging our rights to get ever more guns, but then never keep your word about using those guns one way or another to protect our rights - you use them and the people giving them to you to damage our rights.
Do you get it? I doubt it. It's not like this is the first time it's been laid out in front of you. That happens every day, and you gun fetish wackos never change.