"Let's all screw the 1 percent"

Did you read the article posted on the link? It's about the fact that overtime rules no longer apply for anyone making more than $23,000 a year. A rule that used to be standard for 65 percent of workers now involves 11 percent.

What you're saying is complete gibberish in the context of that article and the discussion.

 

Rule used to cover 65% of salaried workers, not workers in general.

 

Point taken. Correction noted.

Still, we're talking about a very large shift and one that goes well beyond "some people work smarter." And, too, a lot of jobs that used to be hourly have been converted to salary, for that reason.

 

Hey, I was just thinking about this post and it made me curious. How do you know this? Are there numbers/studies to back up your assertion or is that simply your gut feeling? Because while there are surely CEOs who fell into the job or inherited it and breeze along, I'm going to venture a guess that a whole lot of them worked their hind ends off to get to be CEO and continue to do so now that they're there -- if for no other reason than they have the type of obsessive personality that drove them to that position in the first place. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the average CEO of a U.S. company works significantly more than 40 hours per week.

 

I tend to agree with Da Man. Most CEOs didn't get there because they were used to pulling 20 hour work weeks.

Bank CEO I know works a minimum of 60 hours a week and never really has much of a day off but he isn't making 10 bucks an hour either.

 

I don't think it's jobs being converted so much as it's a change in the proportions of jobs that are obviously hourly relative to those that are obviously not hourly. In so-called "flatter" organizations as are the norm today, there aren't many layers between the front-line (obviously hourly) and the managerial ranks. So you naturally wind up with a larger proportion of salaried types, even though the lowest rungs of the salaried "class" don't make all that much money (and certainly not as much, relatively speaking, as those lowest rungs made 20 or 30 years ago).

 

But the "flatness" is assisted by having a good proportion of the company's workforce be managers.

Why pay for an extra employee when you can declare someone a manager and make them work for free?

 

I considered being snarky here, but decided against it. I will simply say that one has to be suffering from a severe pathology to believe this happens with any substantive frequency.

 

According to this, 39 percent of salaried workers make between $23K and $50K, in 2006. Seems hardly an insignificant amount.

http://www.epi.org/publication/flexibility-overtime-hourly-salaried-workers/

 

You really think that banks need that many vice presidents, and newspapers need that many, let's see, Sunday Sports Editors, Assistant Sunday Sports Editors, Night Sports Editors, executive sports editors, chief deputy sports editors, deputy sports editors, assistant sports editors/desk, assistant sports editors/copy, assistant sports editors/NFL, college sports editor, and on and on and on.

It may not be true in lots of industries, but in newspapers, giving someone a title, so they can be salaried is epidemic.

Shit man, I've been on seven man staffs and four of us had titles to make us salaried. There's plenty of places where that is true.

 

I used to work up to 100 hours a week during the peak weeks, without making an extra dime above my salary. And my salary sucked. I was younger then and trying to work my way up. Not something I could do now, not something I would WANT to do again. But at the time it was either 100 hours a week for $22K a year, or nothing.

There oughta be a law.

 

One hundred hours a week for $22,000? Yikes.

I'm curious -- this would be 14.2 hours per day for seven days a week. Now that you, presumably, have less time at work , take me through one of these weeks. What would you do each day?!?

I think a peak week for me was 68, when I covered the NFL, college football, high school football and hockey all in the same month.