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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. I mean, sure I understand crunch time as release-to-production draws near. I have slept in my cubicle overnight before to make sure a critical production-change went smoothly, but that's my choice when I deem it necessary or a manager I respect is in a tough-spot and would really like me to help him/her out. In what world does any manager think they can demand >40hrs/week from me on regular basis? Unless I own a significant part of the company, I'm just an employee and as such >40hrs/week for a regular employee is an indication of a problem.

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"I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal."

My husband is a low-grade chef. The vast majority of places where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well).

And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.

Quite often, the employers kept all tips/service charges. If the staff did get tips/service charges, they went to waiting staff/bar staff.

Only about 5% of the places where he was interviewed did he get offered a 40 hour week, with some of the tips/service charges going to him.

Oh yeah. And all this on minimum wage. Hours worked beyond 40 were never paid as overtime in these places.

He was working in the kinds of restaurants were programmers and other professionals would go for dinner.

He spent the last 3 months living off his savings until he could get a job at one of the 5% of places that operated the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.

>>where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well). And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.

Okay, good for him. But I stand firmly by what I said, that should be illegal.

>>the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.

I assume you mean 40hrs/week. When I hear someone say "take for granted" to describe something, I believe they consider that something a luxury. If 40hrs/week is a luxury, then what do we consider normal? I'm not accepting some 3rd-world sweatshop, or even 1st-world Amazon shipping facilities as normal... or even what your husband went through as normal. Nobody should have to live like that.

If your making minimum wage in the US they are required by law to pay you 1.5x overtime after 40 hours. Which is why many low wage jobs push people out the door at 40 hours. Granted, recovering that money can be a pain but it's vary doable.

http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/minwage.htm : http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs23.pdf

Unless specifically exempted, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay.

> Unless specifically exempted

That's a pretty huge loophole. For example, certain kinds of kitchen staff in hotels and resorts are not required to be paid anything after the first 40 hours of regular pay.

The list of exemptions is ludicrously long and specific. There are exemptions for employees like movie theaters ushers and news announcers, for example.

I believe the distinction is between "exempt" (not due overtime) and "nonexempt" employees. From the US Department of Labor (http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/jobs.htm):

"Chef - may be responsible for all food service operations and also may supervise the many kitchens of a hotel, restaurant group or corporate dining operation. A chef de cuisine reports to an executive chef and is responsible for the daily operations of a single kitchen. A sous chef, or sub chef, is the second-in-command and runs the kitchen in the absence of the chef. For assistance in determining whether an employee who performs managerial duties or functions in addition to his or her chef work meets the duties tests for exemption from the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, begin with the Executive Employee section. For assistance in determining whether an employee who has attained a four-year specialized academic degree in a culinary arts program and who performs these or similar duties is entitled to overtime pay, begin with the Professional Employee section, and select the learned category. The professional exemption is not available, however, to cooks who perform predominantly routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work."

You also can't dock pay by the minute or hour, only by the day.

So basically, you're saying that your husband was abused to hell and back, and implying that the authorities should indeed be cracking down, starting with the more severe abuses in lower-paid, lower-demand professions?

In general, workers have achieved 5-day work week for almost a century and the conditions you describe fit a third-world sweatshop. Maybe it's time for USA to stop being a third-world sweatshop for so many its citizens - take a look at the Fair Labor Standards Act you had in 1938, maybe you can try to achieve at least that standard if you pressure your congressmen enough.

What's really appalling about that post is that the expectation was that people don't complain about working excessive hours. The implication is not only that workers need to work more than the internationally-accepted precedent, but need to do so with total enthusiasm.

I can see people begrudgingly working extra time if the circumstances demanded it, but the idea that complaining about working those extra hours should be a capital offense is horrifying.

Nah it's cool, it's not so hard to just not work for people who don't grok work-life balance. I mean, yeah, sure, labor laws are a great thing, but in this case and in the current market for tech hiring, it's pretty easy to fix by asking "hey what's your work-life balance like?" in the interview, making decisions based on the answer, and leaving if the answer turns out to have been a lie.

...furthermore the cost for such a company will be not being able to recruit and retain great talent. Intangible cost but very real.

Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.

Actually overemploying people should be illegal (at least, it should be illegal without a regulated rate of overtime pay that lets employers and employees rationally negotiate the ethical-lifestyle trade-off involved).

Refusing to hire someone because they won't let themselves be abused is doing them a favor.

They can demand it but they better be paying/equitizing me appropriately.

> I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.

It's interesting that you're so adamant about having the ability to make your personal choices here when you're advocating to take choice away from others.

The article states that the employer demanding 80 hour work weeks cannot find anybody to fill that role for 4 months and counting. Employers have to compete for labor just as employees have to compete for jobs. If somebody offers an 80 hour per week job without offering adequate compensation (multiple times the market rate, a large percentage of ownership, etc), then they'll fail to fill that role.

Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

I probably shouldn't respond, considering the (very stoner) name of "throwaway420", but the employer is in a position of power, so it is not unreasonable to want laws that draw bounderies around your commitment, especially with salary workers.

Fortunately, we work in an employee driven industry, so employers who demand extraordinary commitment can't find employees.

For now.

They'll always find someone who is hungry.

> they'll fail to fill that role.

while this is true (mostly), the assumption is that there is competition, which isn't always the case. Civilized society should set some decent standards to which employers must adhere to, because the invisible hand of the free-market doesn't take into consideration human conditions when it optimizes for profit.

> Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Meanwhile.... http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/25/mori...

Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Ah yes. Here we go. The fabled "free market".

I'm impressed that you seem think there are functioning markets, of any kind, without the rule of law.

Contract law, intellectual property laws, labor laws, health and safety, etc.

Plus a fair and impartial judiciary.

But I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before, and chosen to ignore.

The alternative to the rule of law is might makes right. Which is exactly what all the libertarian "free market" scams all boil down to.

No thank you.

If libertarian free markets were perfect then Somalia would be the tech capital of the world.

If socialist centrally planned economies were perfect then Moscow would be the tech capital of the world.

Well, that didn't solve anything. Maybe one-liner hyperbole doesn't add much to the conversation.

> Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.

Actually, doing precisely that is at the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation. If you think full-on free market is better, there is a (not-so-well) working exemplar over in Somalia.

Because Somalia was such a paradise back when it had a government...

'Free market' does not necessarily imply no government. Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished. That is the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation.

The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny, however well-meaning it may be.

> 'Free market' does _not_ necessarily imply no government.

'Free market' doesn't really have any consistent, coherent meaning in terms of actual objective features.

> Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.

The juxtaposition of this sentence with the last suggest that "Free Market" is a label for whatever a majority of current libertarians prefer; I think this is almost accurate (in use, it seems to mean more whatever any particular self-described libertarian prefers at the moment), and illustrates my previous point.

> The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny

No, that's not true "in fact", its an equivalence based on a subjective value proposition.

Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.

You don't think that requiring people to work 80 hours/week for months or years on end does them harm? Really?

You think that all of OSHA is tyranny? You think that weekends are tyranny? Vacation is tyranny? Laws against sexual harassment at work are tyranny?

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