New bill pushes for shorter 32-hour workweek across the country with no loss in pay for workers

Deplorable Me said:

The troops in the US military will love this.

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These are proposed rules for entities abiding by the Department of Labor rules. The military uses the rules as 'guidelines' but they are in an entirely different system. Most civilian agencies also operate this way. Think civilian criminal penalties and UCMJ rules. 2 separate systems, 2 separate paths...

The proposal for the 32-hour workweek is just political pandering to get more from doing less. This is not what I signed up for when I was 18 and took on additional responsibilities and workplace challenges..

spat said:

If you're on salary, you get paid a fixed amount every paycheck. Typically your hours aren't even tracked. There's no way to pay you time and a half, because you're not paid for time to begin with.

Some weeks you work more, some weeks less, but the check is always the same.

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Well, there must be all kinds of variations of this because I get a "salary". Anything after the 40 hours I get time and a half and double time for holidays. My hours are definitely tracked and is obviously how I get extra after the 40 hours. From what I'm told this is how it's supposed to be.

Vinson57 said:

My company went through a period they demanded we clock 8.5 hours in and out the building and smokers being watched for time at the smoking shed. Without some military type tactics, people abuse the system and do not work 40 hours and they know it. The only way people think a job is good is if no one is on their ass. The kumbaya atmosphere of nothingness.

They are seeding now with this news to all the lazies and they want it.

If there are any hybrid work from home polies, they already get this as work from home on monday or friday is just a day off. They do fake working just enough to fool managers.

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I work from home every day and I usually put 10 hours in, 2 more than I used to when I worked in the office. One because I usually don't eat lunch and two because I wake up early and can't go back to sleep. Now this is on me, my work has never asked me to do this but when I need to go to the Dr or have to watch my kid and work, they never hassle me.

gun_slinger_boy said:

Well, there must be all kinds of variations of this because I get a "salary". Anything after the 40 hours I get time and a half and double time for holidays. My hours are definitely tracked and is obviously how I get extra after the 40 hours. From what I'm told this is how it's supposed to be.

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Its how Europe does it and most public services.

So, basically this is just the 2024 election year equivalent of the 2020 "student loan forgiveness" vote bait?

gun_slinger_boy said:

Well, there must be all kinds of variations of this because I get a "salary". Anything after the 40 hours I get time and a half and double time for holidays. My hours are definitely tracked and is obviously how I get extra after the 40 hours. From what I'm told this is how it's supposed to be.

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You would be a "non exempt salary position" and that is actually different from straight hourly rates.

Here this explains it a little more:

The main difference between an exempt and nonexempt employee in the U.S. has to do with how they're paid and whether they're eligible for overtime pay. There are, however, a few tests based on minimum wage and timekeeping requirements that are used to determine if someone's job qualifies as exempt or nonexempt.

• Exempt employees usually hold administrative, professional, or executive positions. They’re “exempt” from the Fair Labor Standards Act's (FLSA) overtime regulations and, therefore, not entitled to overtime pay.
• Nonexempt employees are typically paid hourly and perform more manual or technical duties. They’re “not exempt” from FLSA overtime regulations and, therefore, entitled to overtime pay for any hours worked beyond 40 in a work week (i.e., seven consecutive 24-hour periods.)

I work 40 hours and get paid by the hour. Anyone who is in my position who thinks he is going to get paid for 40 when only working 32 without something giving is out of their mind.

There are so many different pay structures for so many different jobs. Its impossible to have a universal "work week" number of hours people should work.

Pseonal experience, been a car dealership flat rate tech for almost 25 years. Im paid for production, and I have no safety net. Business is booming, im making bank. Business sucks, im eating Ramen.

I get paid x hours for a job, no matter whT it takes. Book says 2 hours, I do it in 1 or 3... makes no difference. Im getting 2. This makes me motivated all the time. I typically work 60 hours a week at least, often over 6 days, but am usually paid into the 80s and 100s. But I've had weeks paid in the teens before and been there 40 hours. I honestly couldn't even imagine working a pay structure of salary or straight hourly.

I know quite a few guys that have left the "flat rate" business and taken state jobs. They go in a Gung ho hangin and bangin and all the union guys are like "WHOOOOAHHH. Chill dude. Slow down, relax. Get some coffee. You're makin us all look bad..."

I was self employed for most of my working years. 32 hour work week?!? Shit, sometimes I'd do 32 hrs in two days

gun_slinger_boy said:

Well, there must be all kinds of variations of this because I get a "salary". Anything after the 40 hours I get time and a half and double time for holidays. My hours are definitely tracked and is obviously how I get extra after the 40 hours. From what I'm told this is how it's supposed to be.

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AFAIK, most salaried positions don't even track what hours you're working.

I couldn't even tell you how many I worked last week.

And that may be how they do it where you work, but it is definitely not "how it's supposed to be".

AFAIK the vast majority of management positions above the first line supervisors don't track time.

You think executives punch a clock ?

dwa12479 said:

There are so many different pay structures for so many different jobs. Its impossible to have a universal "work week" number of hours people should work.

Pseonal experience, been a car dealership flat rate tech for almost 25 years. Im paid for production, and I have no safety net. Business is booming, im making bank. Business sucks, im eating Ramen.

I get paid x hours for a job, no matter whT it takes. Book says 2 hours, I do it in 1 or 3... makes no difference. Im getting 2. This makes me motivated all the time. I typically work 60 hours a week at least, often over 6 days, but am usually paid into the 80s and 100s. But I've had weeks paid in the teens before and been there 40 hours. I honestly couldn't even imagine working a pay structure of salary or straight hourly.

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Flat rate in NY must be insane.

The same job would take half as long out here in Arizona.

We took our NY jeep to a dealer out here for some warranty work and I bet they had a heart attack.

These guys don't know what rust is LOL.

Had some windshield guys come to the house for the wife's jeep, and they saw my offroad jeep that I was fixing the rotted frame on. The junior guy literally asked the senior one what "that stuff" was. The senior guy had to tell him it was rust LOL.

SomeSoldier said:

So you are good with working 50 hours weekly and only getting paid for 40?

Edit:

I would be ok with salary is we adopted the European rules. You work 40hrs a week and if you work more or get called during off hours you get overtime.

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In situations like that you have to negotiate your salary based on what you figure your weekly hours may be. Im salary, and Im ok with my rate of pay, there are times i work 60+hours a week, and times where its flat 40, or even less. My company is quite fair, and i based my salary on "x" amount of overtime per year.

If youre in an industry that typically has over 40 hours a week then you cant base your salary on a 40-hour work week.

The other aspect is that nobody is forcing any of us into a certain job or career so we are free to choose a path that will be most beneficial to us.

Celt said:

In situations like that you have to negotiate your salary based on what you figure your weekly hours may be. Im salary, and Im ok with my rate of pay, there are times i work 60+hours a week, and times where its flat 40, or even less. My company is quite fair, and i based my salary on "x" amount of overtime per year.

If youre in an industry that typically has over 40 hours a week then you cant base your salary on a 40-hour work week.

The other aspect is that nobody is forcing any of us into a certain job or career so we are free to choose a path that will be most beneficial to us.

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Unfortunately my skill set was determined at a young age. I tried to not go down my career path but ended up here anyway. My problem isn't necessarily that I work over 40hrs, its that employers always take advantage of employees that are salaried because hey I legally can. Every time I have ever asked for comp time for working through a weekend or traveling for work the employer has always stated, well you are salaried. While proudly stating that this is a work place that put family first and has a great work/life balance. Its always why I don't believe that bs anymore, and why I have no issue with making sure I get my time back, hence why I only work from home now.

SomeSoldier said:

Unfortunately my skill set was determined at a young age. I tried to not go down my career path but ended up here anyway. My problem isn't necessarily that I work over 40hrs, its that employers always take advantage of employees that are salaried because hey I legally can. Every time I have ever asked for comp time for working through a weekend or traveling for work the employer has always stated, well you are salaried. While proudly stating that this is a work place that put family first and has a great work/life balance. Its always why I don't believe that bs anymore, and why I have no issue with making sure I get my time back, hence why I only work from home now.

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I get it. I'm told if I have to travel for work (ex, fly to a conference or visit someplace) I should do it on my own time like Sunday afternoon to be there ready for Monday or at evening/night so I can still put a full days work in and not waste it travelling on company time

Drinkthekoolaid said:

I get it. I'm told if I have to travel for work (ex, fly to a conference or visit someplace) I should do it on my own time like Sunday afternoon to be there ready for Monday or at evening/night so I can still put a full days work in and not waste it travelling on company time

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Except, you wouldn't be traveling if it wasn't for the company, so it is company time.

SomeSoldier said:

Except, you wouldn't be traveling if it wasn't for the company, so it is company time.

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Trust me i get it. Just pointing out how toxic salary mentality can be.

"I need you to travel to xxxxxx for the next 3 days. But even though you're going there because of work I need you to make arrangements to travel there on your time so you can still do full days worth of work to keep up with your workload in addition to traveling for xxxxxx" that I need you to do.

Oh there's a conference in Vegas you have to go to, well work Tuesday then fly out there Tuesday evening, go to the conference wed, Thurs and Fri all the while working and keeping up with your normal duties in the evening from your hotel room and then fly home Friday night on a red-eye or Saturday on your personal time

SomeSoldier said:

I work from home every day and I usually put 10 hours in, 2 more than I used to when I worked in the office. One because I usually don't eat lunch and two because I wake up early and can't go back to sleep. Now this is on me, my work has never asked me to do this but when I need to go to the Dr or have to watch my kid and work, they never hassle me.

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This is how I work as well, and I knew it going in. I've been in IT for almost 30 years now. The only obvious difference I have felt in the 9 years I've been with this company is our "team" has shrunk from 16 to 6. The unhappy effect of this is I'm on call 24x7 once every 6 weeks instead of once every 16.

Being on call means I have 15 mins to respond to a page, so I have to drag a laptop around with me that week. Invariably, some C-suite will have an inconvenience that is only an emergency to them and I will get paged at 1:00AM

Drinkthekoolaid said:

I get it. I'm told if I have to travel for work (ex, fly to a conference or visit someplace) I should do it on my own time like Sunday afternoon to be there ready for Monday or at evening/night so I can still put a full days work in and not waste it travelling on company time

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Time to find another company.

Keyzard said:

This is how I work as well, and I knew it going in. I've been in IT for almost 30 years now. The only obvious difference I have felt in the 9 years I've been with this company is our "team" has shrunk from 16 to 6. The unhappy effect of this is I'm on call 24x7 once every 6 weeks instead of once every 16.

Being on call means I have 15 mins to respond to a page, so I have to drag a laptop around with me that week. Invariably, some C-suite will have an inconvenience that is only an emergency to them an I will get paged at 1:00AM

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But that goes to the point of increasing worker efficiency where today workers are xxx% more efficient than a few decades ago. Companies keep exploiting their workers to do more, do more, do more.
The entire salaried "middle management, and professional niche" is being exploited but we just keep taking it because we're told to be thankful we have our jobs and haven't been laid off yet or replaced by AI.

I can absolutely envision a scenario in 5-10 years where in my role I get replaced by a bot that performs my role. As an example what I mean is companies on both sides (sales, procurement, accounting, invoicing) will be replaced by bots that look out for all companies interests and calculate through algorithms the optimal solutions to lower costs while increasing revenue and reducing expenses while improving invoicing and payment. That technology is probably not more than 10 years off.

Drinkthekoolaid said:

But that goes to the point of increasing worker efficiency where today workers are xxx% more efficient than a few decades ago. Companies keep exploiting their workers to do more, do more, do more.
The entire salaried "middle management, and professional niche" is being exploited but we just keep taking it because we're told to be thankful we have our jobs and haven't been laid off yet or replaced by AI.

I can absolutely envision a scenario in 5-10 years where in my role I get replaced by a bot that performs my role. As an example what I mean is companies on both sides (sales, procurement, accounting, invoicing) will be replaced by bots that look out for all companies interests and calculate through algorithms the optimal solutions to lower costs while increasing revenue and reducing expenses while improving invoicing and payment. That technology is probably not more than 10 years off.

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I think a lot closer than that.

Let’s not forget there’s probably not even enough bodies to do this as we would need 20% more workers to accomplish what we’re doing now.

SomeSoldier said:

Unfortunately my skill set was determined at a young age. I tried to not go down my career path but ended up here anyway. My problem isn't necessarily that I work over 40hrs, its that employers always take advantage of employees that are salaried because hey I legally can. Every time I have ever asked for comp time for working through a weekend or traveling for work the employer has always stated, well you are salaried. While proudly stating that this is a work place that put family first and has a great work/life balance. Its always why I don't believe that bs anymore, and why I have no issue with making sure I get my time back, hence why I only work from home now.

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Everybody's got to do what's best for them. Its Human Nature to make things as easy and convenient for ourselves as possible and that includes business owners as well. I had discussions with my employer at the time of my hiring that I am a family man, with responsibilities outside of work. I made it clear that i will put time in when I have to, but will take time back when needed.

Perhaps Im lucky, but I do consider myself good at my job and by being good and not just skating by I have "earned" that type of fainess.

SomeSoldier said:

I think a lot closer than that.

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In my head I can see it coming so trying to think ahead of the curve on how if will impact me. I think within 5 years definitely 10 a lot is going to change and regular office type workers are going to get crushed with layoffs.

spat said:

Flat rate in NY must be insane.

The same job would take half as long out here in Arizona.

We took our NY jeep to a dealer out here for some warranty work and I bet they had a heart attack.

These guys don't know what rust is LOL.

Had some windshield guys come to the house for the wife's jeep, and they saw my offroad jeep that I was fixing the rotted frame on. The junior guy literally asked the senior one what "that stuff" was. The senior guy had to tell him it was rust LOL.

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Oh for sure. The Flame Wrench is a way of life here. We add accordingly to the LTG for corrosion.

My daily driver right now is a 2003 Tahoe. I bought it 2 years ago out of California, spent its whole life in AZ and CA. The guys in the shop couldn't believe how clean it was underneath the first time I had it on a lift. It looked like a brand new truck despite being 20 years old and having 155k on the clock.

Apeman said:

I've seen our current work force. Nobody is 400% more productive and some are way less productive.

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I think you might not be looking at it the right way. It's not that people themselves have necessarily become more productive, it's that technology has been multiplying our productivity. In my field of software development, compilation of code used to take hours. Testing took days, in addition to the need to schedule the lab equipment for testing, often many days in advance. Compare that to today, where compilation takes minutes, resources (equipment) is virtually unlimited thanks to VMs, and testing takes place over minutes or hours and occurs with every code commit (as opposed to once a week/month/whatever).

In my industry, my productivity has increased way, way, way more than 400% from when I started ~20 years ago. I'd say I'm 4000% more productive, if not more. But not because I work harder, rather, because the way I work is different now.

It's not just my industry. You can see similar changes in almost every field. Let's pick retail. Back when I was a kid working in a grocery store, we had to punch in the price and category of every item into the cash register. Then it evolved to scanning, which reduced checkout time by 50% or more. Now there are self-checkout lanes all over the place, enabling one worker to essentially perform the duties of four or more.

Ordering the food to stock the shelves with used to be a manual activity - a person would walk around the store, see things that were low in stock, write down the SKU, then relay that order (via phone!) to the warehouse. That work simply doesn't exist anymore - the scanners note what items have left the store and a computer automatically orders replacements when needed.

30 years ago, mail was sorted by hand. Today, 99% of manual handling of mail has been eliminated. A small handful of workers can run a machine that sorts 500,000 packages a day - that used to require hundreds or even thousands of people.

Does it apply universally? No, of course not. But I'd say it very likely averages out to 400% increased productivity. But not because people are working harder, rather, our work processes are a lot smarter.

Separately, I work 4x10 hour days and love it. If I could move that to 3x13 or something similar, I totally would. Having a three-day weekend every weekend is amazing. I'm able to get so much done.

Celt said:

Everybody's got to do what's best for them. Its Human Nature to make things as easy and convenient for ourselves as possible and that includes business owners as well. I had discussions with my employer at the time of my hiring that I am a family man, with responsibilities outside of work. I made it clear that i will put time in when I have to, but will take time back when needed.

Perhaps Im lucky, but I do consider myself good at my job and by being good and not just skating by I have "earned" that type of fainess.

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All real progress is led by lazy people.

Agriculture: some hunter/gatherer said "running all over the place to get this stuff is hard work, what if it all grew in one place..."

The wheel: "carrying heavy stuff is hard, there must be an easier way".

Etc... etc... throughout history.

OwnTheRide said:

Separately, I work 4x10 hour days and love it. If I could move that to 3x13 or something similar, I totally would. Having a three-day weekend every weekend is amazing. I'm able to get so much done.

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Plus you can avoid the crowds at stores on weekends.