California introduces 'right to disconnect' bill that allows employees to relax | Hacker News Reader

California introduces 'right to disconnect' bill that allows employees to relax

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31 pointshealsdata10 comments

Can someone explain the logic of "exempt" employment, essentially creating two classes of employees, burdening the more educated class with the possibility of working endless overtime as a penalty for getting an education?

Seems like a legitimate lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the FLSA...

“Exempt“ employment reflects a mixture of practicality and legislative horse-trading.

I don’t really see a constitutional challenge, if you’re thinking of the Equal Protection Clause, since it would be subject to “rational basis” review (almost an automatic pass).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review

The "logic" was that the distinction between salaried work and hourly/daily work is far older than government regulations around worker compensation. The government did not want to do away with salaried work and convert all employment to hourly wages - maybe they should have! - so it created two classes of law.

There was always a horrible gap in this law - though less with educated workers like you suggest, and more blue-collar workers who get promoted to low-paid management. Now that white-collar workers have a more competitive job market, it is affecting us as well.

Exempt status does seem very antiquated for low paying jobs (which may not be exempt anymore in certain cases?) like teaching.

For high paying, outcome oriented jobs like software and engineering; exempt is kind of practically required since you may need to work >40 hours some weeks but that high effort is already reflected by the high salary.

I think the intention was to help the economy move from hard, manual labor jobs to easier, comfortable office jobs.

> since you may need to work >40 hours some weeks

"Need"? Why do I need to, in some capacity that couldn't be time and a half?

In most situations where I end up working at dumb hours, the incentives are pretty perverse.

The flip side of being "exempt" is that you still get the salary even if you actually work very little. Last time I got into the legal language of the classification (May 2020, as we were facing furloughs), I remember that it basically said (paraphrase) "an exempt employee is entitled to the full agreed-upon salary for any week of work in which any work takes place", meaning if everything you're responsible for was working just fine and all you did that week was send one or two relevant emails, then you'd "earned your keep"

I generally appreciated this (as opposed to tracking hours) since I was in a sysadmin-like role and outside of some truly busy weeks of deployments or migrations, there was really not much to do. (A friend joked, reassuringly, at times when I found this distressing: "You're basically on retainer.")

That's great, however my current employer said on day one that they expect my timesheet to be 100% billable hours and the categories within our tracking software are designed specifically to a limited set of other categories (that could be defined as "bare minimum responsibilities that a professional has that could be considered non-billable".)

The point of this is to make you believe that non-billable downtime is a punishable offense. And a sort of brainwashing that if you are experiencing downtime, there must be something horribly wrong and you are failing to ask for more work, not communicating with your manager, etc.

So to summarize, in my field, being "exempt" does nothing more than to add additional stress since employers are allowed to frame the implicit, expected nature of "exempt" work as a horrible evil fault of the employee. And, if my feelings are correct, trying to apply time to my timesheet as "non-billable" is a fireable offense.

Hopefully I'm making the case to you that "at-will" employment cannot co-exist with "exempt" employment. By agreeing to work "at-will", employees undermine their status as "exempt."

Or, on the flipside, it teaches all the labor force to become good liars.

I'm curious why an exempt employee would ever have to fill out a timesheet...

>The Department of Labor would monitor adherence and fine companies a minimum of $100 for wrongdoing

LMAO

yikes, that is quite terrible.

violate your employees rights for only 101 bucks

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