Upward or out? I've got to know

I understand. And trust me, I've done stretches both as hourly and as salary. The time I've put in as hourly doesn't even come close to what I've put in as salary. They can, and do, abuse you.

 

I was an assistant sports editor for the last three years I worked at my first paper. As part of the sales pitch, the paper had the outgoing executive editor, who was a father figure to many of us, tell me all of the advantages he saw.

"If you work 50 hours one week," he said, "you can try to work 30 hours the next week to balance it out. If you have to go to the doctor or the dentist or take some time off for something, you can."

When I tried to invoke those privileges after racking up about 100 hours of unpaid overtime in the first five months, I was rebuffed with extreme prejudice.

"You're salaried now," the sports editor and news editor said.

As a guy on the desk said, "Hey, you sold your soul to the devil."

A year later, a lawyer told me that unless I had management responsibilities to the extent that I could hire and fire people, the paper was required to pay any overtime I worked, even if I was on salary. I thought about it, but it didn't seem like I'd get anywhere pushing the issue.

 

Salaried means just that. You work 30 or 50 hours, you get paid the same amount of money.

 

That's not the way this lawyer explained it to me, and he worked in labor law. He said generally speaking salaried means what you said, but he said if you're not a manager to the extent of having firing/hiring responsibility, you're owed anything you work over 40 hours in a week.

Maybe that was another way of saying I shouldn't have been on salary with the level of responsibility I had, which did not include the powers/duties described above. I couldn't hire or fire.

The law may have been changed since then. This was in the mid '90s.

 

I've been salaried since 2000, including in my last full-time job as a journalist. It's been explained to me that as a "creative professional" my job might require more than 40 hours to do the work.

 

Yeah, I think that interpretation of the law became federal law early in the Bush administration. Before, it was a selective interpretation.

I found this on a Human Resources blog:

Employees with certain duties, who earn more than $455 per week, are exempt from the FLSA overtime laws. These include executives and managers who have significant decision-making responsibilities. Usually this includes the authority to hire, fire and supervise two or more other employees.

http://www.humanresourceblog.com/2007/11/05/oklahoma-overtime-and-salary/


It's from 2007, but I know it was the case in the mid '90s, the period I wrote about earlier.

 

It's a bullshit interpretation, but unless you're willing to do a Norma Rae on your desk/cube and pay the consequences, what can you do?

 

Yes, which is why I just let it slide and moved to another paper when I had a good offer.

 

Job mobility might not be the best counter-move these days.