Thanks for bringing my book THE SHIFT into your great column, Mari. As a nurse I really minded the creep of uncompensated time. We were hourly employees, but expected to check email when not at work and keep up with updates for our hospital floor and sometimes attend inservices, all without compensation. So, the expectation was that we were available 24/7 and our time off was never really our own and we were not going to be compensated for that extra time. That is wage theft and exploitation plain and simple. You point out all the dangers of nurses being overworked. Part of why nurses are quitting is the lack of personal/professional boundaries in health care. We are not indentured servants and should not be treated as such.
You struck a chord with me, obviously. I really hate the American idea that work=life, and post breast cancer I have chosen to reject it. I'm lucky in that I'm an author and paid speaker and so have other ways of earning money. A lot of nurses, teachers, Amazon workers, etc. are not so fortunate and have to choose between exploitation on the job and not being able to pay their rent, care for their kids, eat.
“Wage theft” is exactly right. It is especially insidious when employers start adding extra tasks, in theory just this once to help out. This tactic exploits our wish to be helpful and cooperative. And then the extras become expected, and workers are stuck.
This topic has always been dear to my heart, thanks for the perspectives. Bottom line is that I agree our society should learn to adopt expectations that work time has limits, and that people get paid fairly for their time. It's a tough sell here, but some noises about moving to a 30-hour work week might help the discussion.
I found over the course of my few careers that it's most effective to start good habits on day one of a new job. Come in on time, work hard, and leave at 5 PM with your head held high and no excuses. This probably worked for me as I had jobs which were technically skilled and couldn't be quickly replaced. When I had "on call" jobs where I routinely had to work nights and weekends, I did so reliably. But when the boss would ask me to work other times "to help out" I flatly refused and said my on call times where set, and when not on call, I wasn't at work, period. One boss once gave me a not-so-veiled threat that my future career there might be in jeopardy if I didn't pick up a spare project. I replied "Well, then let me make this easy for you, I quit!" (Isn't that everyone's fantasy to do just once?)
I agree with some of what you say here, especially the idea that if employers had to bear the cost of things, they may be more efficient with employee time. A friend of mine, a former Microsoft employee, once proposed that managers should have the cost of meetings (e.g., the time value of each employee at the meeting) charged against their budget with the idea that they'd have to think twice before calling a meeting. I've fortunately never worked in a meeting-heavy field.
However, I don't totally agree with the framing. In a certain sense, employees are always paid for their work. If your job responsibilities include work outside business hours or even outside the period you are "on the clock" as part of your job, you've essentially agreed to do that work to get the pay you are receiving, even if it isn't a structured part of your job.
New York is currently in the process of increasing the number of people who get overtime pay. It isn't going to reach me (I'm a reasonably well paid lawyer) but I was thinking about how overtime pay would impact my job if it was suddenly required. My guess is that, for starters, my firm would cut my base pay so that base pay plus overtime for the amount I currently work equals my current pay. And I wouldn't really have grounds to complain, since that is the amount of pay for the amount of work we negotiated. If I suddenly started getting paid more because of overtime rules, that would really be a windfall for me.
By the same token, I do think employers need to realize that if they start asking employees to do more in a way that makes them have to work more, they are renegotiating the terms of employment in a way similar to cutting a worker's pay and should expect to either pay more or have grumpy workers looking to leave. It's one thing to sign up to be a teacher who has to call parents and participate in after school activities for a certain salary. It's another to be a teacher making a certain salary, suddenly being asked to do these things without additional compensation.
These are all great points. You are right that it would be very difficult to change the system so much that salaried workers would be paid for forty hours and no more, without a lot of disruption and maybe, as you note, pay cuts. I think I must be biased by living in Europe, where businesses only make people work during agreed-upon business hours, and where employees are totally unapologetic about taking sick days and vacation time and leaving at quitting time. But paying workers for overtime will impose costs on businesses, and I'm sure they will try to find a way around paying them. My only hope is that in these times of low unemployment, workers have more leverage to stand up for themselves.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if companies adopted your friend's proposal and had to pay for meetings? I suspect that would eliminate about 90 percent of them!
My organization buckled down on overtime a couple years back - making it easier and quicker for hourly employees to report overtime, and starting to come down harder on their salaried supervisors (not the hourly workers) when their supervisees consistently had to work a bunch of overtime. And now there’s a lot less overtime!
The solution for salaried overtime was to put in a flex time policy, where we can freely flex extra hours worked within a month of having to do a bunch of overtime. Both of these things have improved things a lot, I think.
When I was in 5th grade in the cold and rainy Midwest USA I was assigned to help with the younger children. All the things you thought the teachers should do a few older children (like me) did. This saved the teachers so they could teach and the parents like you from needing to help the children... I guess I was "child labor." I remember thinking it was fun to help. (I had trouble with the boots sometimes.) I don't think my parents thought this was anything exploitive of me.
I actually think this is a wonderful solution! Montessori schools are famous for teaching kids in mixed-age groups, which harnesses the desire of older kids to be helpful and grown-up. This is the way kids throughout history have learned, after all. Older kids assist with younger kids and show them the ropes. This benefits the older kids too, because teaching someone else is a great way to learn about something in more depth. We have really lost this aspect of learning, now that families are smaller and more spread out, and education is so professionalized.
Thanks for bringing my book THE SHIFT into your great column, Mari. As a nurse I really minded the creep of uncompensated time. We were hourly employees, but expected to check email when not at work and keep up with updates for our hospital floor and sometimes attend inservices, all without compensation. So, the expectation was that we were available 24/7 and our time off was never really our own and we were not going to be compensated for that extra time. That is wage theft and exploitation plain and simple. You point out all the dangers of nurses being overworked. Part of why nurses are quitting is the lack of personal/professional boundaries in health care. We are not indentured servants and should not be treated as such.
You struck a chord with me, obviously. I really hate the American idea that work=life, and post breast cancer I have chosen to reject it. I'm lucky in that I'm an author and paid speaker and so have other ways of earning money. A lot of nurses, teachers, Amazon workers, etc. are not so fortunate and have to choose between exploitation on the job and not being able to pay their rent, care for their kids, eat.
“Wage theft” is exactly right. It is especially insidious when employers start adding extra tasks, in theory just this once to help out. This tactic exploits our wish to be helpful and cooperative. And then the extras become expected, and workers are stuck.
This topic has always been dear to my heart, thanks for the perspectives. Bottom line is that I agree our society should learn to adopt expectations that work time has limits, and that people get paid fairly for their time. It's a tough sell here, but some noises about moving to a 30-hour work week might help the discussion.
I found over the course of my few careers that it's most effective to start good habits on day one of a new job. Come in on time, work hard, and leave at 5 PM with your head held high and no excuses. This probably worked for me as I had jobs which were technically skilled and couldn't be quickly replaced. When I had "on call" jobs where I routinely had to work nights and weekends, I did so reliably. But when the boss would ask me to work other times "to help out" I flatly refused and said my on call times where set, and when not on call, I wasn't at work, period. One boss once gave me a not-so-veiled threat that my future career there might be in jeopardy if I didn't pick up a spare project. I replied "Well, then let me make this easy for you, I quit!" (Isn't that everyone's fantasy to do just once?)
Wow, I love this story! Your sticking to your principles--and your end of the bargain--also helps workers who don’t have your leverage.
I agree with some of what you say here, especially the idea that if employers had to bear the cost of things, they may be more efficient with employee time. A friend of mine, a former Microsoft employee, once proposed that managers should have the cost of meetings (e.g., the time value of each employee at the meeting) charged against their budget with the idea that they'd have to think twice before calling a meeting. I've fortunately never worked in a meeting-heavy field.
However, I don't totally agree with the framing. In a certain sense, employees are always paid for their work. If your job responsibilities include work outside business hours or even outside the period you are "on the clock" as part of your job, you've essentially agreed to do that work to get the pay you are receiving, even if it isn't a structured part of your job.
New York is currently in the process of increasing the number of people who get overtime pay. It isn't going to reach me (I'm a reasonably well paid lawyer) but I was thinking about how overtime pay would impact my job if it was suddenly required. My guess is that, for starters, my firm would cut my base pay so that base pay plus overtime for the amount I currently work equals my current pay. And I wouldn't really have grounds to complain, since that is the amount of pay for the amount of work we negotiated. If I suddenly started getting paid more because of overtime rules, that would really be a windfall for me.
By the same token, I do think employers need to realize that if they start asking employees to do more in a way that makes them have to work more, they are renegotiating the terms of employment in a way similar to cutting a worker's pay and should expect to either pay more or have grumpy workers looking to leave. It's one thing to sign up to be a teacher who has to call parents and participate in after school activities for a certain salary. It's another to be a teacher making a certain salary, suddenly being asked to do these things without additional compensation.
These are all great points. You are right that it would be very difficult to change the system so much that salaried workers would be paid for forty hours and no more, without a lot of disruption and maybe, as you note, pay cuts. I think I must be biased by living in Europe, where businesses only make people work during agreed-upon business hours, and where employees are totally unapologetic about taking sick days and vacation time and leaving at quitting time. But paying workers for overtime will impose costs on businesses, and I'm sure they will try to find a way around paying them. My only hope is that in these times of low unemployment, workers have more leverage to stand up for themselves.
And wouldn't it be wonderful if companies adopted your friend's proposal and had to pay for meetings? I suspect that would eliminate about 90 percent of them!
My organization buckled down on overtime a couple years back - making it easier and quicker for hourly employees to report overtime, and starting to come down harder on their salaried supervisors (not the hourly workers) when their supervisees consistently had to work a bunch of overtime. And now there’s a lot less overtime!
The solution for salaried overtime was to put in a flex time policy, where we can freely flex extra hours worked within a month of having to do a bunch of overtime. Both of these things have improved things a lot, I think.
These are both great ideas!
When I was in 5th grade in the cold and rainy Midwest USA I was assigned to help with the younger children. All the things you thought the teachers should do a few older children (like me) did. This saved the teachers so they could teach and the parents like you from needing to help the children... I guess I was "child labor." I remember thinking it was fun to help. (I had trouble with the boots sometimes.) I don't think my parents thought this was anything exploitive of me.
I actually think this is a wonderful solution! Montessori schools are famous for teaching kids in mixed-age groups, which harnesses the desire of older kids to be helpful and grown-up. This is the way kids throughout history have learned, after all. Older kids assist with younger kids and show them the ropes. This benefits the older kids too, because teaching someone else is a great way to learn about something in more depth. We have really lost this aspect of learning, now that families are smaller and more spread out, and education is so professionalized.