Bye, bye, Cyber Monday

Bye, bye, Cyber Monday July 1, 2015

Think of your typical workday — that is, if you’re a salaried employee performing some function in an office somewhere.  You’ve got your list of things to get done during the day, the week, the longer-term projects you need to make progress on.  You log onto your computer, check the e-mail that came in overnight, get a cup of coffee, get started — while also periodically checking your personal e-mail, perhaps, or making a personal phone call or two, or reading the news or facebook or your favorite bloggers.  Lunch might be at your desk, or maybe you go to the cafeteria or out with your friends, and sure, maybe you shouldn’t be doing these things on “company time” but you know you’ll stay late to make up for it and if you record your time you’ll be sure to differentiate it properly, and, in the end, what your employer cares about is that you get your work done on time, one way or the other.  (You never do this?  You work from 8:30 – 5:00, with a half-hour for lunch, two 15 minute breaks, and the remainder of your time devoted 100% to work?  Good for you.)

Now think of how this’d change if your employer had to pay overtime — because what employer would be willing to have employees doing personal tasks during the official workday, then claiming extra pay to finish up the work that they could have been doing instead of looking at Amazon or E-bay?

Seems to me it would make for a radically different workday.

Now, I wrote about the government’s proposal to increase the overtime-eligibility maximum pay  earlier in June, but was thinking about this again in light of a new Tribune article, “If you make less than $50,440, proposal could increase overtime pay,” which reports that the administration has now formally introduced the proposal:

The Department of Labor’s proposal would require most salaried workers earning less than $50,440, or $970 a week, to be paid 1.5 times their normal pay for time worked beyond 40 hours a week. That’s more than double the current threshold of $23,660, or $455 per week, established in 2004.

(To clarify, below this breakpoint, workers automatically receive overtime; above it, to $100,000, workers may or may not receive overtime based on whether their job duties are primarily “executive, administrative or professional.”)

The impact of the proposed rule?

The administration expects 4.6 million salaried employees who earn more than $23,660 and less than $50,440 and are currently exempt from overtime to be affected in the first year. An additional 6 million salaried employees in that bracket who do get overtime will see their protections strengthened now that their status does not rely on the duties test.

Further,

The proposed threshold is equal to the standard salary level at the 40th percentile of weekly earnings for full-time salaried workers. To keep it up to date, the new rules propose keeping the threshold pegged to the 40th percentile as salaries shift or updating it based on inflation.

So, yes, in my prior post I said that there’s a lot of grey, because there are cases where employees genuinely take advantage of people classified as “managers” and require them to work significant amounts of overtime.  And it’s true that the purpose of these overtime regulations in the first place is to establish the 40-hour week as the norm, with excess hours the exception, not the rule.

Now, perhaps moving to making more employees overtime-eligible would, with respect to personal time at work, simply shift things back a generation or so:  back in the days before the internet, before cell phones, there wasn’t as much scope for “personal tasks at work” anyway (except that I remember, growing up, Dad making long distance calls at work when, for instance, travel arrangements had to be confirmed with out-of-town relatives).

So — for those of you who work white collar jobs and are in this pay range, how would it affect you?


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