Filed under: notes
Here’s part of the transcript from a show on NPR about the “reclassification” of employees at IBM from salaried to hourly (bad news):
LISA NAPOLI: It was just another workday for David Canizares, a network administrator for IBM. Then his boss called him and gave him the news.
David Canizares: They said they wanted to be more compliant with federal regulations, so they were going to take us from exempt status to non-exempt status.
That was a fancy way of telling Canizares he still had a full-time job with benefits, but he’d no longer be classified as a salaried worker. He would be paid by the hour. And that wasn’t the biggest change.
Canizares: They had to cut our pay 15 percent.
IBM said the cut was necessary because the reclassified workers would now get to earn overtime. In fact, to make the same pay as before, those workers would have to put in extra hours. But for a third of the reclassified employees at IBM, working overtime isn’t a possibility. So they’re taking home less money.
Christopher David Ruiz Cameron: It’s about the bottom line.
Christopher David Ruiz Cameron teaches labor law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. Welcome, he says, to the modern workplace.
Cameron: Every manager’s job is to figure out how to get as few employees to do the most work for as little money as possible. There’s nothing evil about that. That’s just how that works.
Are they sure about the “nothing evil about that” part? Cutting people’s pay because “now they can make overtime?” If you have to work 50 hrs/wk in order to make what you used to get in 40 hrs, then that’s abuse, not “opportunity.”
Having said that, my husband and I are both architects with 9 and 8 years of experience, respectfully. While he makes about $13,000 more than I do, he’s salary and I’m hourly, and I am indeed paid overtime and bonuses when projects end. Last year, I ended up making $300 more than he did. (And I secretly loved watching him sweat when he figured that out while doing our taxes.) Also, I work for a smaller private firm (150 employees) and he works for a larger nationwide company (40 here in town, and about 1,000 across the country).
Comment by Mile High Pixie 04.29.08 @ 5:56 pmWell, I see evil everywhere (and good!), so I’m not the one to ask.
The other issue is that overtime is often strictly regulated by a manager so it’s not as if everyone can makeup the wages lost (or should have to).
Comment by Ms. Theologian 04.29.08 @ 6:00 pmThat’s funny. Meanwhile, our dept doesn’t allow hourly OT and we’re currently trying to get our last two hourly workers onto salary so that we can let them work OT again.
That may sound awful but keep in mind both of them desperately want to work OT not for the money but so they can actually get their work done. I had a hard time keeping one of them from working unrecorded OT when I managed her.
Comment by GhostGirl 04.29.08 @ 6:19 pmThe biggest benefit of salary, I found, was the flexibility. There were times when OT was necessary to get the work done, and times when it was slower. They balanced each other out. One could deal with fluctuations in work load without having fluctuations in income.
Too often, unfortunately, exempt status is an excuse for employees to be doing more work than their FTE (full time equivalent) allows for. Kind of like that tomato picking thing.
Comment by h sofia 04.30.08 @ 11:19 amIt seems to me that intent is key to understanding reclassification in terms of whether or not it is screwing the employee. I would guess that most of the time it does, and is intended to save the employer money.
Comment by Ms. Theologian 04.30.08 @ 2:35 pmLeave a comment
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