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Comment by doubled112 | Hacker News Reader

As an IT Professional (I've always assumed this was intentionally vague)

You are not entitled to:

    daily or weekly limits on hours of work
    daily rest periods
    time off between shifts
    weekly/bi-weekly rest periods
    eating periods
    overtime pay

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

Canada (Ontario specifically in this case) gets a lot wrong as well. Any movement in the right direction is a good thing.

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I'm in the US, and here very very few jobs have even 1 of those things you listed here. What proportion of the world has those things? Like 7-8 countries total?

Edit: I guess I need to stop commenting at this hour, HN is ridiculous with their down votes when the Europeans are on. God forbid someone tries to ask a question here.

My state has legally mandated lunch every 6 hrs and overtime pay past 40 - mind my asking which state you're in? It sucks if those are all absent in both Ontario and in general here.

Regulations are often different for hourly and salaried workers. At least where I am all tech is salaried.

The thing is the above things are not a general thing. Those are rights that IT workers specifically don't have, that are otherwise mandated by labour law. So, one of the countries that has these things is actually Canada (or more strictly speaking, the provinces of canada, since this is provincial jurisdiction but they all broadly follow the same formula including afaik this exemption).

IT is not the only field with these exemption but it is perhaps one of the least motivated. Afaik, it was added to the list when most IT workers were working in critical infrastructure like telecom. It's not really justified anymore, if it ever was (imo it isn't justified for anyone, but I am probably rare in thinking that in an entrepreneur-focused space).

Don't blame the Europeans, Americans downvote anything in favour of freedom of contract (or against unions etc) just as well.

It's not quite as bad as reddit, yet, where you get downvoted to hell for suggesting that the rule of law is preferable to mob violence against people accused of being 'parasites' or accused of certain crimes or thoughtcrime.

I'd wager it would be closer to 7-8 (larger, developed) countries total NOT having most those things.

I know this is "very European of me", but those are all very basic worker rights that most reasonable countries have had for decades.

I live in Toronto. Ontario enacted those laws targeting IT professionals in the 1990s to attract "IT companies" by making things flexible for them. This was before the current acute tech shortage. As somebody who entered the tech field circa 2003, I saw companies take advantage of some of these early on (especially related to overtime). Nowadays, I can pretty much dictate the terms of my employment.

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