Overtime Pay and Wage Theft

There’s a good article in Time magazine on the history of the management “overtime threshold” and how “job creators” use it to screw workers out of wages.

I posted it a while ago but it apparently upset some “tender sensibilities” and got FA’ed. It’s well worth googling.

intercst

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Saw that way back in the mid-70s. Quit that job shortly thereafter.

Is this the article?
https://time.com/6168310/overtime-pay-history/

No revelation to me. I was cheated out of hours, OT pay, and vacation time, every place I worked.

Steve

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Is this the article?
https://time.com/6168310/overtime-pay-history/

Yes. Had the management “Overtime threshold” kept pace with inflation over the years, you’d be eligible for overtime today if your salary was below $83,000/yr instead of the current threshold of 35,000/yr.

Just another way for money to get shoveled to the top of the pyramid.

intercst

“No revelation to me. I was cheated out of hours, OT pay, and vacation time, every place I worked.”

I worked for a mega-telecom. The boss actually insisted that if you were working, you were on the clock, company wide ( at least for us coddled unionized workers, lol ). When we got called out
in the middle of the night, the clock started with the phone call. Almost all of the
supervisors came up from the rank and file, and all in all they treated us pretty good.
We still had the occasional coworker who wanted to suck up to the boss by working for free,
and I can recall a couple of times where they were given warnings, by management, to not do that.

I was “lucky” enough to have worked non-unionized jobs before hiring on with them, so I
was very appreciative of how I was treated. Worked hard, and was always there when I was
supposed to be.

Somehow, over the last few decades, working class people were turned against unions.
I hope they are wising up, they have some power in the labor market now, they need to
be smart enough to use it.

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( at least for us coddled unionized workers, lol ).

As noted before, unions don’t have the influence in Shinyland that they had in the 70s. Now, for the vast majority of workers, recent pay increases can be taken away as easily as their company paid pension and retiree medical benefits were taken away.

The general public has also been brainwashed that unions are “bad”. The TV news calls union leadership “bosses”, like they are gangsters. TV news repeatedly reports on how corrupt some UAW officials were, but they hardly ever report on the equally corrupt officials at FCA. Even as a few “rogue underlings” at FCA went to the clink, the company itself only received a slap on the wrist.

FCA guilty in labor corruption scandal as auto industry marks new low

A Fiat Chrysler U.S. executive admitted Monday the automaker conspired to break federal labor laws by paying more than $3.5 million in bribes to union leaders, marking a new stain for an auto industry beset with scandals in recent years involving vehicle emissions and faulty equipment implicated in hundreds of deaths.

The $30 million fine is dramatically less than the $900 million rival General Motors Co. paid to settle claims for faulty ignition switches implicated in 400 injuries and deaths. It also is a fraction of the $800 million FCA paid two years ago to settle diesel claims, or the billions Volkswagen AG paid to atone for its global diesel scandal.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/20…

Steve

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I worked in publications for about 30 years. Copy editors were “salaried” and could not earn overtime regardless of how much they worked (and still are, most places); but if you go free-lance, you get paid by the page. This means the smart people did no overtime but moonlighted for other employers, whose copy editors were doing the same thing. It is kind of crazy, when you think about it. It would be a heck of a lot easier for the publishers just to pay overtime, and probably wouldn’t cost that much more, since they could hire fewer people, probably.