Up until about two years ago, I was an hourly employee for my entire life. It's a pretty simple setup: you agree to work at a specific pay rate, you work for an hour and you get paid your rate.* And then I entered the mystical land of "salaried exempt employee." What does 'exempt' mean? Exempt from overtime and other various protections, basically.
See, in these here United States, courtesy of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, there is a category of employee whose pay is tied to the job that he does rather than the hours he works on said job. It sounds great, if you realize that as long as you do the job you're told to do, you could work 25 hours and get paid the same as some other guy working 55, if you're more efficient. Of course, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Here in reality-land, "Salaried Exempt" is usually a fancy term for "professionals who do work that is expensive and would cost a lot of money if paid for hourly with overtime." I'm really not sure who had the great idea first, but the general premise in most companies is that 40 hours is the minimum and then "good employees" work above and beyond 40, in exchange for "good reviews" ... or something.
From where I sit, it basically amounts to doing my job and doing it well. Sure, sometimes that takes more than 40 hours, but I agreed to be salaried and exempt and so when it takes 45, I'm ok with that. After all, it's my job and I take pride in doing it well. From where I sit, the problem arises when that job balloons into a 60-hour week (which it hasn't for me, but it has for friends of mine.) Also, note that I'm not working 45-50 every week, just some weeks. I know guys who are on mandatory 45 and 50 hour weeks for months at a time, and in my books, that's also problematic.
After all, it's one thing if you work 45 to meet an urgent deadline and even moreso if you're doing it because you should have been able to do 40 but screwed something up and had to stay late. On the other hand, 5 to 10 hours every week amounts to hundreds of hours over the course of a year that you're essentially giving away ... because it's not like you're getting paid any more than you were at 40.
Obviously, there are going to be jobs (like executive management) where the pay is predicated on a scenario of more than 40 hours a week. And as long as those expectations are clear on both sides of the line, nobody can really complain when the average work week looks a lot more like 60 than 40. But the point is that I've had friends who are hired under the clear expectation of a 40 hour week and find themselves grinding out 50s for months at a time with naught but the "oh, it's only 10 extra hours and we need it for the good of the company" as their reward.
Of course, in the end, all employment is voluntary. In a down economy, sometimes extra work has to be done because the funds simply aren't there to find extra help in some smaller companies and even big companies are feeling the pinch to the bottom line. So really, the moment of truth is going to be when the economy rectifies and seeing who really gets rewarded.
And to me, that's the real irony. See, I'm not sure about a lot of other places, but I know that in the Defense Industry, the best way to get the best raise is to go work for another company. And that's pretty much anecdotally universal from every person in the field I've ever talked to. Which is odd, because sure, there's some inertia that needs to be overcome to get someone to move and switch companies, but it just seems bizarre to me that the company typically willing to pay an employee the most money isn't the company who's just benefited from that employee's skillset and effort (and who's invested the most in that employee), but a competitor. That just seems kinda counterintuitive.**
To those inclined to try to read between the lines, I'm not advocating leaving my current job, nor am I trawling for job offers. I'm just sort of puzzled. I know that large companies tend to suffer inverse economies of scale as far as things like worrying about individual employees and efficiency are concerned, not to mention that the Defense Industry is full of large economies and has an extra layer of logic insulation imposed on it by having to deal with the US Government every day. It just seems that this is all strangely counterintuitive enough that I would have seen more about fighting this sort of thing on a systematic level throughout the Defense Industry than I have.
*Less social security, tax withholdings and premiums. So really, you work an hour and get paid half of your rate, but you get the point.
** Unless, of course, that employee really wasn't worth it and the company he's leaving knows it. But then, they're usually pretty happy to see said employee hired away.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at March 27, 2009 11:19 PM | TrackBack