Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThePowerOfFuet | Hacker News Reader

Much of what I read in this article is outright illegal in many parts of the world.

American leadership? Nope.

This is largely illegal here in the USA too. This article neglects to point out the fact that everyone except for the railway workers are either police, fire fighters, medics, or nurse which are professions that have legal exemptions from laws governing overtime and such.

The rail workers are not pulling 80 hour weeks, the article says they can only work 4.7 hours of overtime in a week, so 44.7 hours a week. Only emergency services and hospital staff are exempt from the laws that protect people from this sort of stuff.

There are some extraordinarily broad exemptions to overtime requirements. From memory, it basically boiled down to anyone whose job can be described as spending a majority of their time on a computer.

In my last corporate retail job, we had mandatory unpaid overtime. Assistant managers were required to work 44 hours and managers had to do 48, but got paid for 40.

Though those same overtime exemptions had their own counter-exemption if you had less than some number of employees as a manager. Because corporate wouldn't raise starting wages or approve new hires, many stores were below that limit and it was a huge scandal when some of them started demanding overtime pay. By then we were looking at 50 and 60 hour weeks with no overtime pay.

Can you expand on how this works? Presumably retail workers have to log hours and clock in/out. Did the company demand you falsify your hours? Or did they just not pay for some of your hours? The latter seems clearly illegal, it's wage theft.

Managers are salaried and get paid a flat 40 hours a week. We did have to track our hours to ensure that we were meeting the minimum hour count.

So yeah, they basically just didn't pay you for all of your hours. It might technically be legal, but the company doesn't actually care about that. Wage theft is rampant, we all know that already

Agreed, wage theft is definitely rampant, but with this it seems like you can very trivially report this to the state and get free money? You've got the hours and pay documents in writing, showing that to the state should get an immediate response. Or does the state labor department just not care?

The FLSA is a joke. You can be forced to work unpaid overtime if you work with computers and your salary is over $35k/year among other nonsensical exemptions.

It needs to be completely rewritten without any exemptions. If you’re expected to work, or be available to work on short notice, you should be getting paid full or more salary for the time.

This is a huge problem for IT workers as companies expect computer systems to run 24/7 but frequently refuse to pay for more than one shift to support them so people end up working 24/7 and can’t live their lives because they’re tethered to computers.

This, among other things, is why IT workers need to unionize.

Always refreshing to see someone on HN with a properly forward-thinking head on the shoulders. My first tech job taught me a lot, and none of it was tech-related.

As far as I can tell, this is not true at all.

“There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek. The FLSA does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, unless overtime is worked on such days.”[1]

“In general, federal mandatory overtime laws follow guidelines set by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA establishes the primary regulations for overtime pay affecting employees working in the private sector, as well as in federal, state, and local governments. The FLSA outlines the following guidance about overtime:

-Nonexempt employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked over the 40-hour workweek. -Pay for overtime must be a minimum of 1.5 times the regular rate of pay. -There are no limits to the number of hours employees 16 years old and older can work during a workweek, other than the fact there are obviously a finite number of hours in a workweek. -Overtime pay is not required on weekends or holidays unless overtime is worked on those days.” -Employers may penalize employees who refuse to work required overtime. Though the penalties can vary by employer, there are no federal guidelines for employer penalties on employees refusing to work mandatory overtime. In some cases, employees may be subject to discipline, reassignment, demotion, or even discharge. -Employers can require nonexempt employees to work beyond their 40-hour workweek hours without any notice, such as requiring employees to work another shift without any notice.[2]

So basically there is no limit to how much an employer can ask their employee to work mandatory overtime, as long as they are paid for their over time hours at a minimum of 1.5x rate.

[1]https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime#:~:text=There%20is....

[2] https://blog.namely.com/mandatory-overtime-laws-for-each-us-...

I work in a industry that is not at all related to any type of emergency services, supply line or transportation sector. People in my industry still regularly work at minimum 50-60 hour work weeks and very often 70-80 hours a week (in often relatively physical jobs). We are usually guaranteed a turn around time of 10 hours (how many hours we can have between our shifts— which is really just 8 hours if you factor in travel time), and that is only because our union recently fought for that in our last contract negotiation.

US labor laws are still very much the Wild West of labor laws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com