Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles
cbsnews.comI worked for a restaurant that did this to me. To make sure I hit the "minimum hours" (when you start talking about hours vs tasks or responsibilities you probably aren't getting into a legitimate salary arrangement) they would have me clock in and out, and I'd get pay stubs with 40 hours (less if I worked less) and the overtime hours paid at $0.
They withheld my last paycheck when I quit and stopped responding to my calls so I had to file with the PA labor board, I sent in those paystubs and answered questions about the role and what I did there. Couple weeks later they send me a check for 20 grand out of the blue, the business had to pay back overtime becuase I was misclassifed. I was just looking for the $300 or so they owed me, was really surprised with the outcome.
> Couple weeks later they send me a check for 20 grand out of the blue
Glad this ended up working out in your favor. Your story makes me wonder how often such a practice doesn't end with the employer forking up the 20 grand they stole. I guess I've heard it said that wage theft is the most common form of theft but this is still rather frustrating to think about.
Does this sort of practice come with some other punishment or does the board just tell the employer to pay what's owed?
Lots of people don't know about labor boards so I think they get away with it most of the time. In ten years across seven restaurants in the restaurant industry that was the only time I was paid time and a half for overtime, lots of places do cash overtime instead. Even the chains have stolen labor from me, did a month at Applebee's and the manager would "save me time" by clocking me out 15 - 20 minutes early at the end of the night (it took seconds to clock out). Illegal immigrants in particular know that they are unlikely to get their last pay in the restaurant industry, they aren't likely to sue or contact the authorities, they also get screwed on workers comp claims when they get injured. We talk a lot about unfairness for waitstaff but that's paradise compared to the back of the house. It's absolutely commonplace and likely happening at any restaurant you go to.
In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected, so they wrote a similar check to the labor board, that's how they are funded and I think it's revenue positive.
> In PA they have to pay double whatever is collected
That's exactly the thing I'd hope to see. It's unfortunate that it's such a process, considering how easy it is to simply not know.
Even many body shops run with h1-bs, and by Asians try to not pay the last pay check. ESP if it is corp to corp, these staffing companies try to not pay the last invoice.
I think in California, even illegals are eligible for workers compensation.
> Your story makes me wonder how often such a practice doesn't end with the employer forking up the 20 grand they stole.
As gp showed, most people are not fully aware of their labor rights, and when they are, may not know the remedies available to them. Wage theft is endemic because of information asymmetry.
The most common outcome is that the employee ends up with no remedy because most people don't know anything about labor laws or about the fact that most states have a department of labor or equivalent that can solve the problem for you.
When I was an 11 year old, I got a job working for a local swim club. I'd go to the property, open the gate, and clean the grounds and take out the trash. They figured since I wasn't technically old enough to work, they could pay me $2.30 an hour when $4.25 was the minimum wage at the time. I adjusted my recorded hours versus worked hours accordingly. Given that there were no cameras on premises, the timesheets were manual, and I was always there alone, I never had an issue.
Reminds me of a lifeguarding job I had at a private lake club when I was a teen. They let me report and set my own hours. I never abused that trust, but it was pretty strange when my boss explained that they'd pay me for however much I chose to work during daylight hours (the lake was "closed" after dark.) I did end up working a few very long days on holidays for the extra cash.
I do wonder how many of these are honeypots to see which workers they'd like to invite back next year.
It's pretty well-known that the point of an internship isn't to actually accomplish any useful work, it's to determine which students you would like to extend an offer to for full-time employment. Not a large leap to assume that a lot of adolescent employment follows this pattern. The wages you'd pay a teen are chump change for most businesses, but responsible, intelligent, trustworthy employees basically disappear from the job market after their first job (because everybody wants to keep them), and so it can be a great investment to identify, vet, and introduce yourself to them before they're on the open market.
"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay." -- Soviet Russia
All they had to do was give you your last paycheck, they would have saved 20k and gotten away with it
I've said this before, but if you steal $300 from the store, you go to jail.
If a company steals $300 from the employee, the people in charge - the CEO - should have the same fate. It would solve the problem pretty quickly.
20 Grand ... like 20.000$
WOW. That’s a nice surprise.
Why the downvotes?
As a small government advocate, i have no issue with labor boards.
the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner.
> the alternative is violence or unionization, neither of which are optimal in resolving disputes like these in a civilized and efficient manner.
Unionization is a great way of solving disputes. Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization.
To put violence and unions at the same level seems uncalled for.
Unionization can have serious problems/risks. I this case, where the business is literally breaking the law, there is no need to get a union involved.
Wage theft is illegal. It should be treated as a legal issue where the state gets involved and uses its monopoly on force to enforce the law. That's what the state is there for.
[Aside, putting violence at the same level as unions: I've been around a union, while working in a factory in the midwest US, that had "kneebreakers" that "encouraged" members to vote a certain way by threat-of-force, support certain candidates for union leadership, and used the Union to blatantly extort local businesses and politicians. Not every union is like this, but blue-collar unions in the US have a history of going this way. Which, even tho I like unionization in theory and cheer a bit inside when I see union action at e.g Starbucks or Amazon, I have seen a very terrible union and so they scare me.]
Wage theft is overwhelmingly not enforced, and it's the largest form of theft in the country. Until this is not the case, unions are the best option.
Labor laws didn't happen because of noble-minded politicians or kind-hearted captains of industry.
A lot of unions directly block solving disputes, choosing instead to deny all disputes. I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months. These were the type of workers that would keep government equipment after retiring, quitting, or rarely being fired, requiring the government to send officers to collect. Any movement towards trying to get the workers to do literally anything or simply rating them low was met with vehement pushback. Like a union representative storming into you're office and yelling.
In this case, the union was a giant ball of mud whose only existence was to hold the government hostage.
As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords.
> I know one union that was perfectly happy letting government workers make sox figures while "working" from home, while they produced objectively zero work over a period of months.
"Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles" is fraud. If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like , how much do you hate companies were you have thousands of examples of bad behavior?
> As much as I dislike Thune power corporations can hold, unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords.
I do not know what concept do you have about unions, but it seems come from anti-union propaganda and not from any reasonable definition of what a union is. Unions gave us the eight hour work week, vacations and many more rights. That is not "overlord" behavior but being able to negotiate with powerful corporations.
>If you do not like unions because ONE did something that you do not like
Not the person you are replying to, but I think discounting the behavior of unions as one-off is not helping. The examples I have are from outside US though - there are entire states where union presence is strong. Those states had a good industrial sector but over several decades the unions made it so problematic for the industries there that majority of businesses moved to states where there were no unions. Public calls for "strikes" and other work-stopping behavior and violence is common occurence in those states. So the risk of a union becoming mafia-like is more than just propaganda - it has plenty of examples worldwide in several countries.
I described something that literally took place, and the behavior was performed by a union, not me. This isn't propaganda. It is a description of something that happened involving a union. If I am anti anything, it is anti-"institutions that have mismatched incentives and conflicts of interest", and so that involves both corporations and unions, but not all of them. Note that my original comment said very clearly that "unions are not a fix all and can become the same overlords". Your comment that I replied to seemed to imply that unions are a silver bullet that fixes anything wrong with corporation and worker relations, and that is what I was replying to that that is not always the case. There are plenty examples of this.
On hackernews most of the complaints I see about unions are people who've had direct experience with unions.
My experience with unions was they were shady, jobs were given out based on nepotism, work was given out solely based on seniority and most work you did for them involved kickbacks.
I have direct experience with both types of unions and it's super frustrating. SF labor unions whose members threaten you with violence over who can move your own property to your car: screw them. Harvard University union trying to get basic benefits for staff of which my wife was one: love them.
Every system is only as good as the people in them.
We must read different HNs. Most of the what I see is anti-union FUD from people raised on horror stories about unions but without any actual contact with them except for possibly being inconvenienced by someone else's strike.
Generally I am more suspicious of public sector unions than private. The power of private sector unions is counterbalanced by the profit motive of the company; meanwhile governments are often perfectly happy wasting a fortune in taxpayer dollars.
To the extent that the government wastes money, why should we believe that's due to a union and not unrelated issues such as outside politics?
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/federal-union-wants-4...
You tell us, is a 47% increase in pay "normal"?
why did the body intended to help with the negotiations write this:
The union’s proposals “do not appear realistic for what should be a fairly advanced stage of negotiations. The numerous proposals are not focused and they would result in an increase to compensation far beyond what is reasonable,” reads the unanimous report signed by three commissioners.
> You tell us, is a 47% increase in pay "normal"?
Maybe. Depends on what the value they provide is.
In the tech industry, getting a 47% raise by job hopping to a new job that does the exact same thing, isn't unheard of, so it seems entirely plausible it could be justified. If it actually is in this case, i don't know, but its not crazy on its face.
Conrad Black built the National Post around the Financial Post, a financial newspaper in Toronto which Hollinger Inc. purchased from Sun Media in 1997. Financial Post was retained as the name of the new newspaper's business section.
Beyond his political vision, Black attempted to compete directly with Kenneth Thomson's media empire led in Canada by The Globe and Mail, which Black and many others perceived as the platform of the Liberal establishment.
--wikipedia
The point you are attempting to make is unclear??
Is your point that you can copy/paste from wikipedia and provide no actual commentary??
You can’t say whether that’s unfair or not without looking at where they’re starting from. Did they have long pay freezes under past austerity programs? Has the cost of living increased significantly in the primary areas they work? (e.g. how much would a Vancouver school teacher’s pay needed to have gone up over the last 20 years just to live in comparable housing?)
Given that PSAC are asking for 4.5% raises during a period of high inflation I’m skeptical that this is that unreasonable rather than that there’s political hay to be made claiming it is. If they haven’t had cost of living increases for a while, they’ve already effectively had a pay cut.
> you can’t say whether that’s unfair or not without looking at where they’re starting from.
Assuming that you did not read the article, I am not stating it is unfair, the independent board they engaged to help with the negotiations stated this.
Many people lost their jobs and had to take pay cuts during COVID, why are federal employees exempt from market forces?
You can simply step back and watch what is taking place in Canada right now.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/federal-union-wants-4...
Because it is not going anywhere, they had an independent body get involved, their commentary says it all:
"The union’s proposals “do not appear realistic for what should be a fairly advanced stage of negotiations. The numerous proposals are not focused and they would result in an increase to compensation far beyond what is reasonable,” reads the unanimous report signed by three commissioners."
These same union employees are also fighting "unilateral contract changes" that mandates they return to the office, but did not fight the unilateral contract changes that allowed them to WFH in the first place?
The contract they signed was for "IN_PERSON" work, so they are simply being asked to do what they signed up for prior to COVID.
>These same union employees are also fighting "unilateral contract changes" that mandates they return to the office, but did not fight the unilateral contract changes that allowed them to WFH in the first place?
Huh? They fight against contract changes they don't like, and don't fight against contract changes they do like? Sounds pretty crazy to me.
> would result in an increase to compensation far beyond what is reasonable
Its a negotiation. The union asking for the highest number it can get is what its supposed to do.
> Its a negotiation.
Only relevant in a spirit-like sense, but reading this line immediately reminded me of this scene in Intolerable Cruelty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PpQk63iIWw
Apologies for the phone-based typos. Corrections: sox -> six, you're -> your, and Thune -> the.
Folks with union jobs tend do better then their same industry non union counterparts, in terms of wages, health care, access to sick days, etc.
There is however a third choice, which is government regulation. Unfortunately government regulations can't adapt as quickly as a union can to changes.
Maybe the relatively inflexibility of regulation is what is needed to maintain a minimum necessary commitment to living wages and reasonable benefits though.
> Folks with union jobs tend do better
Just like planes which survived battles only had bullet marks on their wings.
> Many big corporations need to be counter-weight with some other big organization.
Such as labor boards, or rather the government that gives them power.
What really matters is how human institutions and organizations shape each other's incentives and costs [1]. Instead of aiming for abstract, intangible goals like "small" or "big" government, how about developing a sense of institutional design and relating that to a set of moral and political values. That way, it's actually possible to debug disagreements, either reducing them down to moral values and hopefully leaving it out of the public sphere or locating actual policy questions with less room for aesthetics and more for evidence, studies and sensible debate.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10481/w104...
Unionization is amazing. I do not know why especially people in US are so against this. Did they just gave up and are okay with the big corps fucking them over withouth having any leverage?
Maybe you should stop thinking that the working class is stupid and start thinking about why they rejected unions.
My working class family members (all in the same trade) universally hate unions and their reasons are quite reasonable; my grandfather was in union leadership until he was run out by the mob and my cousin had to pay tribute (e.g a protection racket) to the new leadership.
My brother in law is a Pepsi truck driver (has been for almost 25 years). He’s always bragged that he gets paid the same pay and benefits as those in a union, but doesn’t have to deal with dues “etc.”.
Recently he had to go on medical leave. When he was ready to go back to work he had to take a physical. He had to go a week without pay until the results of the physical came back. It is total bullshit but he didn’t have a Union to back him and not worth it to sue.
Update: He’s only had a few of these issues in his career, so maybe the union dues he would have paid outweighed the cost of getting stiffed. Adding this because my point wasn’t that unions are awesome, but they can have value… the question is at what cost.
My mom was a nurse. She helped unionize her profession back in the 1960s.
By the time she retired in 21st century, she hated her union.
She particularly hated their support for Obamacare. They had an exception so it didn’t affect their agreements. But that ignored the fact that the nurses had to actually implement it.
It was an administrative clusterf*ck. Nurses spent hours listening to consultants telling them how to improve patient reviews, which were now tied to compensation.
The unions were like “the Democrats now owe us, so we will get paid back down the road.”
She literally quit over that.
The union can be good or bad. I'm a former IBEW member.
The reality is that you are adding a lot of extra 'management' on top of the existing company management when you bring in a union. At the end of the day, a union is a business and it is a profit-seeking business. Employees have to raise a massive fuss and get momentum from members in the union to receive any sort of defense from the union for their grievances.
The rotation aspect is also annoying. If you enjoy a particular job, you are forced to rotate out so that other members can have a chance. The juiciest roles always seem to go to the senior members. If you an apprentice, you just have to take what you get, and endure whatever hazing, teasing, and abuse you receive (tech workers jaws would hit the floor if they witnessed what I lived through).
At the end of the day you have to remember that there is one pie. Everyone wants a piece of the pie... management, employees, and union. Adding more overhead and more bosses is not always an effective way of getting more pie to the employees.
I do not know why especially people in US are so against this.
I think there's some truth to the old adage that there's a class of Americans, especially represented among the HN crowd that "see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor in the US. Some cultural yeah, but just as much, if not more, legal...
"Right to work" legislation
Employers fighting harder against unionization
Decreased enforcement of labor laws
Judges (including SCOTUS) who keep striking down labor protections
Media portrayal of unions
Tech industry generally has a shortage of skilled labour. That gives labour a lot of power, which makes unions seem less important. At least when times are good.
Living in America is expensive, wages are relatively low, and long labor fights result in financial devastation that might take years to recover from despite some of the gains being virtually negligible in terms of real impact on the wallets of employees. There are many people, especially of boomer age, who are still haunted by long-term strikes. Strikes have more of an effect when they're against smaller companies. Huge conglomerates like Shell and Exxon don't care. They can afford to wait them out.
> wages are relatively low
source?
If wages matched the increase in housing prices alone, then where I live $260K house in 2019 would cost $295K today, not $387K. Wages also do not reflect the necessary change in borrowing habits for many people. Prices have gotten so high that people are being forced to borrow money that they wouldn't have needed to in the past, usually at insanely usurious rates.
People are being bled dry by unsustainably high interest rates and housing costs due to the insatiable appetites of big business.
>> wages are relatively low
>source?
>> If wages matched the increase in housing prices alone
Ah. I thought you meant wages were low relative to other countries, when they are actually among the highest.
This is sort of the nature of inflation though, prices increasing faster than wages- but there is a feedback loop, as increasing wages increases prices.
> People are being bled dry by unsustainably high interest rates
Asset price inflation is probably more driven by low interest rates. Higher rates should bring down asset prices, ceteris paribus.
Because many American labor unions became infiltrated by the mafia giving them a bad rep.
more than a hundred years ago, the USA was not a large world power.. more than half the country was frontier and a lot of raw agriculture that is dependent on labor. When the 'red' social flames burned through Europe at the end of the Great Monarchies, political people here in the USA were seriously worried. So an ugly deal was forged.. the hardcore lefts were jailed and harassed and beaten.. and insider right wing groups that knew how to play for the long term were elevated to power. This is not popular to say, but the history is there for the reading, about ethnic gangsters running unions across the USA. It never was completely cleared up and persisted well into the 1970s and perhaps later.. The public relations campaign by Big Media was very effective at smearing the name of Unions to the public, and the Unions made some dumb moves, too.
High tech and Hollywood generated huge money, and Wall Street style money was always anti-Union. It is worth saying that Hollywood movie production is very heavily unionized, and that small system works pretty well.
Another interpretation is that the New Deal institutionalized labor. Labor got a seat at the table in exchange for removing radical elements.
new movie out -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman
What do unions have to do with small government? A union contract is an agreement between two private parties.
But it’s not. There are tons and tons of “union laws” that treat unions very differently than any other entity.
Some of these laws hurt unions, others help.
For example, a union contract can’t require an employer to hire only union members.
That would create a situation where people would apply to the union first, and if they union accepted them, then they apply for the job.
That would give unions too much power, so it’s not allowed.
Another law forbids sympathy strikes. Unions can only strike against their own employers, not in sympathy with other strikers.
Modern labor law also seeks to discourage strikes by using a war-game like approach to negotiating. Maybe a good idea, maybe not. But certainly not something that happens for non-union orgs.
If we adopted a “hands off” approach to unions, we could easily wind up with insanely powerful unions.
If 2% of the working population went on strike simultaneously, the economy would stop working quickly.
So general strikes are very illegal, even though they are 100% in accord with libertarian ideology.
My interpretation of that comment was, "I'm not in favor of increasing the size of government, but I'd rather see a government labor board exist than another union."
Nothing. Small government is relating to government run labor boards.
I worked at a university in Florida that did this to me. I was being made to work overtime on a few software projects and making a nice little amount of extra money. Then one day I found out that I was being "promoted" to a manager title. No raise or any extra benefits, but I was no longer allowed to get overtime. It was part of a campus-wide initiative to cut costs. And now that I was a manager I was expected to work even more than before.
Year later, the day before I gave my two weeks, my boss told me I was becoming known as an 8 to 5 guy... I wasn't working enough extra hours. After I told him that he wasn't paying me enough to waste my life away at the job, he wasn't too surprised when I gave my notice the next day.
An 8 to 5 guy is a 6 to 10 guy at home, and that's already pretty weak on the work-life balance scale!
> I worked at a university in Florida that did this to me.
Florida academia and pay fuckery, name a more iconic duo. FIU Alumni and Ex-Employee Here.
I had something similar. I was contracting for a company as a solution architect. Got paid OT for any hours I worked over 45. I was working 75-90 hours a week. Not because I wanted to, that was just the workload. They offered to bring me on full time with benefits. Salary was 40k less and no OT. I declined. Then they said ok but they have to cut my OT. I said fine and never worked a minute over 40 hours a week for the next 6 months before quitting.
I'm old enough to recall the subtle bait and switch we've done. 8 to 5 phrase used to be 9-5.
The fact is the majority of the work day is wasted, just like I waste ghz all the time because it's cheap, why wouldn't employers waste your time if it's free?
Just curious: are you able to refuse a promotion. Especially this kind of “promotion”? What happens then? Do you get fired because… reasons or do you just keep your current job title etc?
If you're employed "at will" (and almost everyone in the US is) you can't refuse "promotions." From the company's perspective they are deciding to no longer employ you for position a, but they are simultaneously offering to employ you for position b. You can take it or leave it.
Employment "at will" means either the employer or employee can end the relationship at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
> If you're employed "at will" (and almost everyone in the US is) you can't refuse "promotions." From the company's perspective they are deciding to no longer employ you for position a, but they are simultaneously offering to employ you for position b. You can take it or leave it.
That's not correct. Being employed at will means that you _can_ be let go for refusing a promotion (or just about any other reason) but it doesn't mean that automatically happens. There are plenty of companies that understand that some people reach a point where they don't care about climbing the ladder anymore and don't want to take on more responsibility.
And failing to take a promotion probably isn't a "for cause" reason to deny unemployment insurance payments/claims.
No. My boss rewrote my job description to fit the new type of position and then my position was changed. He convinced me it was my path to promotion. I suppose that was true - I was promoted again. This time I was given a 1k raise, but I was taking on the additional duties of a manager that quit. So double the work for another 1k a year.
Start sending manager and hr to jail for wage theft. If an employee falsified timesheets they can and have been convicted of theft. Why isn’t the reverse true?
Jail is a huge motivating factor and why you don’t see wide spread accounting fraud in public companies.
That's probably not a path you want to go down. Do we start putting employees in jail for wage theft?
Yes, at appropriate levels. I worked in several regulated financial institutions. Every year it was part of compliance training to be reminded that if you notice, for instance, money laundering or financial fraud, you can be personally liable and go to jail.
This isn't a new concept at all. Professional engineers have similar levels of risk if they breach ethics, though I don't know if it's criminal or just self regulatory and civil.
Yup. When I worked in the defense industry, even as an unlicensed engineer, I was bound by threat of prosecution to report a wide category of violations. Per our agreement with the US DoD, even workplace injuries which could impact our readiness fell under this definition. Now that I'm over in the finance space, if I ever notice anything suggesting a financial crime, I am required by law to report it.
We already put people in jail for false timesheets. Wage theft is in the billions .
https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/nsa-contractor-pleads-gui...
Yes. Theft is a crime regardless of how it's done.
Why not simply execute the criminals?
No, you should quit instead.
Making offering not enough money to someone a criminal offense sounds like a dangerous ground to stand on.
> offering not enough money
This is not what would be illegal. Wage theft is actual theft in the sense that they knowingly have something (and even sometimes attempt to retain the something) which is legally not theirs. Yes, the worker should quit. Yes, the worker should go after what's owed them. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
It’s not about offering, it’s about having done it.
If an employees took the same amount of money it would be theft, so illegally not paying that amount is a very similar crime.
This is about following the law. Has nothing to do with offering money. Manager is a defined role with specific responsibilities and tasks.
It's not about "offering" enough money it's about companies that are deliberately classifying employees as "managers" when they're anything but for the purposes of avoiding having to pay the employees overtime.
It's just semantics, you're not compelled to stay and work for someone who is low-balling you.
The people aren't compelled to let you to continue to peaceably do business in their country if you don't wish to follow their laws.
Employers can just fire people who falsify time sheets. Or take money from the register.
And they can have the employee prosecuted. Just let the inverse happen when employers steal from employees.
The classification fraud is a crime. It's also tax fraud because you're understating proper income partly to avoid paying taxes on it.
This is far from simply offering a low wage from the beginning.
I’ve said it before but I’ll keep pounding the drum that the FLSA needs to be completely rewritten.
Any work more than 8 hours in a day should result in overtime pay regardless of type of work or base salary.
It’s ridiculous that companies can force people to work 24/7 with no extra pay just because those people happen to work with computers or in "knowledge" work.
And even developers/IT folks are largely not making FAANG money. They're working at hospitals/insurance companies making the equivalent of what a factory worker made in the 1950s.
> Any work more than 8 hours in a day should result in overtime pay regardless of type of work or base salary.
When I worked at a government contractor this was part of the deal. Any more than 48 hours a week and you'd get all your time over 40 paid as OT where they converted your salary to an hourly rate.
I got a job at an agency afterwards. I immediately understood why Hollywood production jobs are so serious about their time. You can make your grips work through lunch or dinner, but it's gonna cost you money. I would have loved that deal, but how are you gonna unionize an office like that? It's a lot.
It's not that simple though. I'm an IT Director. A good chunk of my time is just thinking and not doing. It's impossible to measure the amount of work I do in a day because I'm thinking about stuff when I shower, or am walking the dog etc. Do I sit at my laptop 8 hours a day? Fuck no. Do I work 8 hours a day? Probably, but it's hard to say. I can't say "I worked for 9.5 hours today" because it's impossible to measure.
I think it is pretty simple - do you have to be somewhere or be available for more than 8 hours a day? If you are 24/7 on call for issues, that deserves a huge pay bump. In other fields it's even more true - doctors for example, when oncall, have to be ready to work at a moments notice. So no drinking or other recreational drugs, or going skiing somewhere remote, or being out of cell range... If it effects you life for more than 8 hours a day, you should be payed for that.
I'm a design engineer. A lot of my time is also thinking. I can be "working" but actually just reading articles or clearing my mind. And I can be in the middle of a gaming session later that same day and suddenly come up with a solution to a problem. How many hours I work is very subjective based on your definition of "work".
But to make up for this I am also compensated several times the median household income. And the threshold for paying people like me should definitely be set to at least 2x the median household income for the region in which you work or 2x the federal average whichever is more. Currently, that'd be a minimum of $141K/yr. I feel that's a reasonable cutoff for no more overtime pay.
> It's impossible to measure the amount of work I do in a day because I'm thinking about stuff when I shower, or am walking the dog etc.
This is why work from home was such a boon. Finally i could have shower thoughts on company time. Finally I could get away from the incompetent coworkers who kept asking me to do their job for them... some days I'd literally help others till 5PM and then start my job when they went home. And then my boss would say "You missed your delivery" and Id be like yea, but the 10 people who cant function without me hit theirs... Somehow that lesson wasn't part of their MBA.
(I'm always happy to help those who are truly trying and willing to do the work!)
The article isn't mainly about manager titles. The manager titles are just part of the way companies justify paying people a fixed salary (with no paid overtime) vs. paying people for the hours they work.
They found that the incidence of fake-sounding manager titles spiked at the legal threshold of $455 a week — exactly the cutoff at which a company would be allowed to put workers on salary and sidestep OT payment laws.This is not quite true. To be exempt from overtime, the position has to pay that much and meet a set of requirements[0]. The inflated "manager" titles are not just to dupe the employee, they're an attempt to skirt Federal labor laws, which is why the article mentions companies losing lawsuits over this practice.
0: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
"However, Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA provides an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for employees employed as bona fide executive, administrative, professional and outside sales employees... Job titles do not determine exempt status. In order for an exemption to apply, an employee’s specific job duties and salary must meet all the requirements of the Department’s regulations."
I'll never understand how $11.38 an hour is manager money in any line of work.
It's not and doesn't meet the minimum requirement for a salaried worker. I believe you need to make $48,500, or roughly $24ish/hr.
The Department of Labor's increase of the standard salary level to $47,476 was blocked by the courts.
> The Department increased the standard salary level from $455 per week ($23,660 per year) to $913 per week ($47,476 per year) in a final rule published May 23, 2016 (“2016 final rule”). That rulemaking was challenged in court, and on November 22, 2016, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas enjoined the Department from implementing and enforcing the rule. On August 31, 2017, the court granted summary judgment against the Department, invalidating the 2016 final rule because it “makes overtime status depend predominately on a minimum salary level, thereby supplanting an analysis of an employee's job duties.” Nevada v. U.S. Dep't of Labor, 275 F. Supp. 3d 795, 806 (E.D. Tex. 2017).
The current standard salary level is $35,568.
> When applied to updated data, these methodologies result in a standard salary level of $684 per week ($35,568 per year) and an HCE total annual compensation level of $107,432. Finally, the Department intends to update these thresholds more regularly in the future.
> The Department estimates that in 2020, 1.2 million currently exempt employees who earn at least $455 per week but less than the standard salary level of $684 per week will, without some intervening action by their employers, gain overtime eligibility. The Department also estimates that an additional 2.2 million white collar workers who are currently nonexempt because they do not satisfy the EAP duties tests and currently earn at least $455 per week, but less than $684 per week, will have their overtime-eligible status strengthened in 2020 because these employees will now fail both the salary level and duties tests. Lastly, an estimated 101,800 employees who are currently exempt under the HCE test will be affected by the increase in the HCE total annual compensation level.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/09/27/2019-20...
Hmm, you're right that's not the requirement now, but based upon the documents provided by ineptech, it looks like:
"To qualify for exemption, employees generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and be paid on a salary basis at not less than $684* per week." as of January 1, 2020. It was at the previously mentioned value before that.
So that's $17.10/hr to be a manager, or about $35k / year.
Depends on the state.
Federally: Currently, the salary threshold for exempt employees is $684 a week ($35,568 annualized) https://www.fisherphillips.com/news-insights/planning-2023-c...
Miss-classifying employees, earnings or costs are great ways for companies to cheat taxes and labor laws.
"Self employed" is used in the same way. Many people in the gig-economy are just employees that are not legally hired because companies want to avoid any responsibility while still profiting from employees.
In my country there is a legal difference between an employee and a manager position, so just giving the title alone doesn't mean anything. There is nothing really different about it in reality, but to truly be a manager you need to have a different job contract.
Additionally there is a limit on the ratio of managers to employees, if it's too high can get you in trouble with the labour board. When my company opened an office here, the first thing they did was hire the managers who then hired the team below them - but due to the limit not everyone could have the manager title at first.
My first thought as an easy fix for this was similar to what you are suggesting - I was thinking to be truly qualified as a manager you need to have at least 1 or 2 direct reports over a certain period of time or else you don’t qualify. I think in practice that is essentially almost the same as the ratio requirement you are talking about.
Banks have been doing this for decades. If you're not a VP within 3 months some may wonder if something is wrong with you.
"VP" title is a regulatory requirement because only "bank officers" have legal authority to do certain actions.
Some of the answers excuse this as "only a VP has signing authority."
That probably accounts for some of the VP titles. I kinda doubt that all the VPs in your average BofA office are always signing things, and couldn't possibly just go to their boss for a signature, like normal people do.
I was under the impression it was partially a client relations thing; "Oh, I'm talking to a vice president of the bank! I must be important!"
Right. Part of the ego boost of the title.
My coworkers and I used to joke that at banks, even cleaning staff get VP titles.
Banks hand out VP titles like candy so that the customers think they're hot stuff and being treated well.
People outside the finance industry really buy it too. I think it's because in most companies, VPs are above director. Only in finance, is it below.
> I think it's because in most companies, VPs are above director.
Every now and again someone whose spent a career exclusively in finance gets bitten by this when transitioning into the business world. A friend once told me a story about a deal with Amazon nearly getting tanked when I coworker chewed out an Amazon VP, saying they wanted to "talk to someone who could make decisions". Took a lot of massaging to salvage that deal.
Enjoyable to imagine this. The ex finance people I work with are quite toxic towards those lower on hierarchy. Cool to hear about someone being bitten by it for once.
That must've been a fun wall to be a fly on.
Ahh, but those are not real VPs. Those are likely all AVPs ( less power, less money ) and not VPs or SVPs. Naturally, all the customer sees is a vice-president, but for HR purposes they are 'only' AVPs. I kinda hate it, because I have ridiculous title for HR purposes now myself and I am 'just' IC in real life.
edit: added quotation marks to just. I like being an IC.
I think it depends on the bank. I worked at Bank of America and random mid-career programmers were legitimately VPs. Officer -> AVP -> VP -> Director was the title progression at the time.
Can confirm: I made VP at Merrill Lynch at 28 I think. It was complete BS; my resume literally says "Vice President (I have no idea why we were all VPs either)"
I recently started working in finance at a F500 company and the number of vice presidents is astounding. People doing data entry are vice presidents. What's really interesting is there are 5 - 10 CIOs as well
Banks doing this is for a completely different reason.
Banks aren't trying to stiff their traders out of overtime. They do it because a VP has certain signing power as an executive that regular employees don't.
have been through this many times and very HR department on the sell and buy side says the same thing.
It’s just pay bands and it’s different per company. At some financial institutions, everyone is a VP, except maybe the call center and retail associates.
My time working at Bank of America was strange because of this. Everyone's title was either Analyst or VP.
The key take-away here is to know what you're doing. Schools don't teach this stuff. High school doesn't teach personal finance to a necessary degree, nor do they teach kids the realities of both the job market and the impact & traps of a college education. They've been geared themselves to feed the college industry with fresh victims and leave students with "passion" ...a passion that cannot pay the bills. We need a fundamental shift from college tracks to productivity tracks. Teach kids how to manage money, file taxes, start businesses, tinker, invent, start trade businesses, and bring back shop class. Dump the idea that you need a college degree to be successful, you don't, unless you are committed to entering a profession like medical, law, or applied sciences. The failings of today are the result of the shortcomings and bad ideas of 20 - 40 years ago. The amazing part is that this can be fixed in a single generation with the right leadership, will, and plan; which mind you has already been written and executed successfully but 70 years ago.
I’ve noticed that in larger technology companies there has also been a trend towards getting a “Manager” title but leading a team of 1-2 people. Maybe there will be intent to grow this to 3-4 people or more in future years, but that hinders giving others a title and their own small team (which can be considered career progression).
Then you might see another leader (Manager of Managers, or “MoM”) who has 5 of these small-team managers, a different title, but a total organization size of 10-15 people.
This feels like a shift from a generation ago when the bigger technology companies wanted flatter organizations and most managers would have teams of 8-12 people, the MoM roles might be 50-80 people, and beyond that executive roles with 100s of people.
I don't really have a problem with this. The best organizations lean into the fact that an organization needs to do more than just make a product, they also need to help their employees "grow" in their career. For those interested in the management track, starting small with a small "blast radius" makes a lot of sense. The organization isn't saying that having managers for every 2 people is the best way to allocate management resources, it's saying that it's the best way to train new managers.
No disagreement on blast radius and the point on training new managers, instead what I find less logical is when a 50+ person organization has 25-30% of people as manager roles, meaning this isn’t an exceptional or temporary situation (i.e. training one or a small number of new managers), it’s actually a core part of organizational design.
It’s done like this bc leadership at those companies want to have certain number of directors reporting to them (for resume padding purposes). The directors then need sr manager reports who in turn need multiple manager reports, etc. Pretty sure it has nothing to do with concern for low level employees’ careers as up and coming managers
I got stuck in this trap for a bit at my last job. I was called a "manager" and expected to do all of the managerial bits, but only had 2 others on my team that were very junior. Yet I was still expected to take on a full IC load, yet also deal with all the upwards reporting stuff, and I had to "find the resources" for all the forced work that was being put on us, and there was tons of it- datacenter moves, all kinds of transparent changes that were happening beneath us but still needed someone to "check out" on the weekends to ensure things weren't broken, etc. And of course any outage that happened, my name was front and center, but big successes, it was in there... somewhere. This was during covid, and headcount was always "about to be approved" but Covid. But this. But that...
Never again will I fall into that trap.
It is getting even worse where you are seeing increase of “head of…” titles, my friend just became “head of performance analytics” at an online media company and he is the only one in his “team” (so technically his title is vacuously true as logicians would say :D ).
My friend at Microsoft manages a small team. The expectation is managing takes 1hr a day per report. So if you have 4 reports you should still be making IC contributions half the time. It’s not like once you get the title you get to sit around and fill space the rest of the time. (Not to say that never happens but any competitive company would resist that.)
After seeing my first job promote devs working solo to "director", I learned that titles mean absolutely nothing, or less than nothing since they're often a distraction.
You can go become a senior or lead developer in some companies with only two years of experience, but the head of the local very large international airport is a director.
Was once a senior engineer at a small-ish office of a fairly large company. We had a particularly high-strung junior engineer that was prone to throwing fits if he didn't get his way.
Apparently, one day, he threatened to quit for another offer. He was placated with some trivial pay increase and promotion to lead engineer (essentially leap-frogging the other seniors in the office in title - but not in pay).
Except no announcement was made; I had no idea he'd been promoted. One day he walks into my office and starts telling me I need to redesign some module using XYZ Design pattern.
"Nope, don't think so - that would be a pointless and unnecessary complication and we have a release on Friday."
"No, you need to do it. I already talked to the Engineering Manager."
I can't remember exactly what I said next, but it wasn't very nice.*
Then I'm getting called into the Engineering Manager's office: "Can you just do the thing he asked you to do, please? I know, I know... we kinda have to humor him on this."
* - of course I remember what I said, and it definitely wasn't nice.
> “I know, I know... we kinda have to humor him on this."
I’m sorry… what? Why did they feel the need to placate a junior at all, let alone with a leap-frog promotion? In what way was a junior engineer not replaceable? Was he someone’s cousin or something?
Oh boy, how did that play out? I feel as though it's a give a mouse a cookie situation with people power tripping like that, I can't imagine it resolving well until they leave...
I left the company not long after that, so I don't really know how it ultimately played out :)
"fire the assholes", there's a whole chapter on that in the Dilbert Principal.
Sounds like a manager that is afraid of confrontation.
Somewhat tangential but an acquaintance at a Fortune-500 level company mentioned to me they are converting tons of currently salaried employees to hourly. These are white collar desk jobs at corporate HQ. I have to infer theres some sort of cost-cutting (wage theft?) motive behind this. Are these types of tactics becoming more prevalent in the white collar world?
My guess: so they can flexibly cut hours when they need to save a bit of costs in a way they can't with salaried employees.
Yep, how about a nice zero-hours contact coupled to a non-compete clause. Bring your own stool so you can sit in the lobby and wait to see if you'll be making any money today.
Unlimited time off is another gem they use.
Unlimited time off would be a better idea if the company could define a reasonable minimum amount of time you must take off during the year. Then there is no guilt or coercion involved.
Unlimited is such an absurd word. It should be "Flexible". It should be we will NOT fire you if you take 23.5 days instead of the ideal number of 22. Also, if you take 18 that is not a problem either.
It's not "flexible" either. It's "non-accrued". The only reason it's non-accrued is so that the company doesn't have to pay you left over PTO when you leave the company and gets it off their books. Everything else is a euphemism to make employees feel good about getting fewer benefits.
You could have this flexibility with accrued PTO. I've previously given employees additional, off-the-books time off because they needed and deserved it and when we all got laid off they still got the remaining PTO paid out.
Edit: add section on flexible alternative
My second job, I agreed on a start date having forgotten that I had a week-long cruise booked for the very next week. It had been arranged a year or so before by a friend and just was not on my mind. So I started week 3 of that job with a -40 hour PTO balance.
Companies have a lot of flexibility in deciding how the accruals work. But, as you said, the important part is that when it accrues, at that point it's a legally-obligated right for you to either receive that time or be paid for it.
One hint is that you only see this in jurisdictions without strong labor laws around PTO. Some places, you have to give at least X weeks accrued a year for all full time employees (might be laddered by tenure) and you have to allow them at least Y continuous days/weeks per year; they may also have to to spend all of their accrued time within a short-ish window (limited rollover).
In this sort of environment, I've never seen a company claim "unlimited".
Intercom are headquartered in Ireland, and have unlimited PTO. When I interviewed with them, the recruiter said she averaged about 4 weeks a year (which is below the legal minimum). You do have to take the leave within the first quarter if the year following.
> he recruiter said she averaged about 4 weeks a year (which is below the legal minimum)
how does that work?
I think she, like anyone else in that situation would be forced to take leave before the end of March of the following year.
I don't want accrued benefits. That means that someone owes me 1000s of dollars and I cannot have that debt honored unless I quit my job?
I generally try to work at places that value my contributions but do not try to micromanage me. If I want/need to take time off, I do. If at some point I'm taking off so much time that they no longer feel that I'm contributing enough to the company, then fine they can let me go.
I’ve always worked at accrued vacation companies, but it was never really an issue. You can take vacation in January if you want, although if you blow your whole vacation in January and quit in February I suppose that could cause problems.
The contract will often have a payback clause or reduced time for the first year of vacation hours if they are granted annually. So the benefit is earned more than it is awarded ahead of time, the company shouldn't complain that you use it.
Joseph Turner White: “What's an associate producer credit?”
Bill Smith: “It's what you give to your secretary instead of a raise.” [1]
1. “State and Main”, by David Mamet
Some of these companies have "code-of-ethics" document which is mandatory for every employee to read. I had to read & acknowledge as a freshman software engineer at a firm which abused visa-on-arrival for work purposes.
The sheer hypocrisy is mind-blowing!
If your categorization can be subverted by changing a title, it either needs a better definition or it needs to not exist. Otherwise you're making decisions based on daydreams that can wreck people's lives. And I'm very pessimistic about a better definition, since I think technology is going to make the line between "worker" and "manager" even blurrier over time, in practice if not in law.
Having direct reports would be a fairly sensible condition that would be difficult to fake, it not being in the law revels that the law is working as intended.
A very large company I worked for did something similar..
They ran a call center for merchant credit cards. Every associate on the floor had the title of "account manager." That way, when a customer whose request for a credit limit increase was declined or who had some other complaint asked to "speak to a manger," the low-wage associate could reply "Sir/Ma'am, I AM a manager."
As an employee, I wouldn't be too miffed about a fake "on-paper" promotion with a fancy job title. In the short run, it's not usually beneficial to anything other than your ego, but in the long-run that fancy title is your ticket to job-hopping to a better situation.
From a business perspective, this seems like a sort of a penny-wise, pound-foolish decision because an employee who has a fancy "Director of X" title is probably more likely able to find employment elsewhere because of their fancy job title. In the long run, a company will probably pay more through having somebody swap jobs, having to pay extra to poach somebody, and pay for recruitment and training.
> Generally, companies are required to pay workers one-and-a-half times their hourly rate anytime they work more than 40 hours in a week. But there's an exemption for salaried managers, who receive the same amount of pay each week, as long as they earn above a certain minimum amount.
Somehow I feel the companies are not the problem here. That exemption is pretty ridiculous to have in the first place. Regardless of these "fake" managers, why don't "real" managers deserve OT pay?
I worked in IT for a large Telco, as an "Application Manager". I managed nobody and was responsible for a few big systems (but not accountable, an important distinction)
Eventually getting to know the union rep it was widely accepted they had added "Manager" to the title of every salaried employee so they didn't have to pay overtime, could call you in after hours, etc.
It made us smile when even 18 year old call centre people had "Manager" in their title on their first day at their first job.
I guess this is news if you study at Harvard Business School, not so much if you've had a job in industry anytime in the past 30 years.
This is even a trope on sitcoms and has been forever. lol
Every teenager who has ever had a job at a convenient store/fast food/restaurant/hotel/etc knows this. Enough of the population simply likes it because it keeps prices low for them, and maybe some of them justify it themselves by having been already subjected to it.
Not to mention that calling a 19-year-old "manager" and maybe giving them a different color uniform shirt is a good way to get that 19-year-old more engaged in the job, that doesn't involve any extra expense on the employer's part.
This is not actually how the FLSA works folks. There are tests to determine if a given employee is exempt or not and they have nothing to do with their title. So go talk to your local dept of labor and get them to take action against your employer.
Also, some posters here have said that simply working in IT makes the job exempt. Not true.
Source: family member formerly worked in this field.
I've long thought that companies should have mandatory hours reporting and limits on Salary positions. That is they must collect the actual hours worked by people of that title in their company, and report it to candidates.
$250K for 35hrs a week at a casual company vs $375K at a 996 ByteDance, I know which side of that equation I'd choose.
I once knew a 'shop manager' whose salary was 60% of what most of 'his' mechanics were making before they worked overtime. They usually went home at 4; he usually didn't.
When a baby with birth problems arrived for poor Jerry, it cost him more than a year's salary.
On the flip side I think one company game me a manager title in order to offer the pay rate I wanted. It also came with a higher annual bonus - up to 15 percent vs 5 for others. My boss was a bit of a micromanager so he mostly ran my team - the official system also gave mixed signals on who they reported to.
I expect the IRS will start regulating this the way they did the abuse of contractors.
The result will screw some people for whom the arrangement (contractor / exempt) works will, will make the paperwork tedious, but will overall help most workers.
People gaming the system just cause Bastiat loss.
You also need to factor in the size of the company. A VP is a very different thing at a Startup vs Amazon.
If I understand the article, I have seen the opposite happen. Someone is given manager duties without a pay increase or a new title.
But at my current company, they will eventually get the new title, not sure of a raise though. Maybe at that company it is kind of a trial.
It's correct. Some people choose status over money. https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-over-money-money...
"The solution, then, is to pay the low-status workers a bit more than they are worth to get them to stay. The high-status workers, in contrast, accept lower pay for the benefit of their lofty positions."
The consequence of this is job title inflation.
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-scourge-of...
That’s not what this article is about.
What about Apple changing the title to associate for former employees. Makes me think of Jony Ive. Would have loved to see them list his title as "Associate" when he left.
Fake titles also help with attrition.
If the employee feels like they are being promoted, instead of actually getting a title change and raise, then they will likely not leave.
Are people really not just completely mercenary about their title?
Like I can see putting up with a title change that comes with a small raise if there is new work that is more interesting and the new role opens up a better pay band, but I can't see why the title itself would motivate someone for very long at all.
There's more nuance to this topic than "Company bad! They trick dumb labor into a bad deal!"
Money isn't the only form of compensation a job can provide. Give a low level worker a $0.43 cent raise, and they won't give a crap, it's not enough to change anything. But give them an 'employee of the month' medal and a new title, arguably worth much less than $0.43 cents, and they may actually prefer it! It's something for their resume, something to tell their mother about, these things adds prestige and dignity to a hard job that may have none.
You have it exactly backwards. A low level person might get a 6% raise from that $0.43/hr. That's a lot! Someone making six figures on the other hand is getting a sub-1% raise. To say nothing of the use they have for those dollars. That might be the difference between fixing a car or not to a lower level person. To a higher level person it's a new console.
Meanwhile, "employee of the month bagging groceries and promotion to sr. Bagger" doesn't mean much, but a higher level person is likely to value something like a title bump that they use on their resume to get the next job.
I was once a low-level worker who got a $0.75 raise and I cared enough to find a better job. Had nothing to do with my lack of "employee of the month" medal but rather the fact that I couldn't pay rent every month without adding to my credit card debt.
Fair enough I also don’t give a crap about company accolades or titles, and wish it would all just go towards increasing my compensation.
Some people, however misguided they may be, don’t think like we do though
I agree. People like to know they're appreciated. This is a new way to let them know they're appreciated. Nothing inherently sinister about it unless you're opposed to the idea of private companies doing positive things
I challenge you to find a single person making less than $40,000 who would rather get a new title and no overtime pay ever again vs. $2000 extra per year.
Inflation for everything.
I've been a "Senior Engineer" for over 10 years now.
I work on internal web applications at a company who sells a physical product (read: not a tech company). I started the job when I was in my late 20s and my title was "Senior Something-or-other". Around the time I started, I told that to someone who works outside IT and their immediate response was, "You don't look very senior."
Yeah, tell me about it.
What do those apps do?
Nothing special; they’re just interfaces for managing internal data.
This happened to me at a non profit - everyone had a manger title even though very few (myself included) didn't manage any people. I found out later on that I couldn't get overtime, and this was the reason.
Much like how coders like to call themselves "engineers" - a term that has actual accreditation and certifications attached to it, but somehow not in the computer science space, weird.
Eh, it's pretty nuanced. Certification, rigor, and lots of other things that software folks associate with "real" engineering aren't actually that different between software and traditional engineering projects.
I recommend checking out Hillel Wayne's series where he interviews what he calls "crossovers", people that worked both in software and in traditional engineering: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/
Thank you for the earnest reply to my snarky comment. I'll check out that series!
CSE is a degree at many colleges not unlikely the other Engineering sciences (ChemE, MechE, etc.)
Edit: also, there's some muddy waters where you have a degree in engineering (civil, chemical, etc.) but aren't technically an "engineer" unless you have state certification, which is a separate process; but you would nevertheless consider yourself an "engineer"
I always call myself a software engineer, hoping to bait someone like you so I can reveal I actually do have an engineering degree.