An employee can't set their own hours. The whole justification of exempting "salaried" employees is that they can set their own hours, so after days of working late, they can decide to spend days leaving early. But that really only applied to the boss, the CEO. No employees have that kind of autonomy. The exemption was a scam from day one.

There is a huge difference between an employee and an officer, MichMan. By definition an employee is an individual who provides labor to a company or another person, while an officer directs that person's labor and has a position of authority in a hierarchical organization.

As someone who worked lots of overtime in my life, all of which I was paid for, I would be in a constant state of rage had I not been eligible for overtime, despite the long hours I worked.

If you are not in a position to effectively say, No, then you should always get the overtime pay.

One of the things that is very wrong with our culture is that people are expected to live to work, to give everything to the job, never mind family or personal life. And that's totally fucked. Work should come second, at best, to living.

I am fortunate in that I figured that out many years ago, that I was not my job. And it came about because I started a volunteer stint at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian. Before doing that I identified myself totally with my job. During the docent training I quickly understood that I was not my job. I was a person who did that job. It transformed me. And to this day I will argue with people about this.

No one ever lay on their deathbed and said, "I wish I had spent more time at work."

Last edited Fri Mar 8, 2019, 09:45 AM - Edit history (1)

I disagree with your definition of what level of employees should receive overtime. There are many levels of employees from low lever supervisor to high level middle management. Not all of them should be eligible for overtime pay.

Games can go into overtime periods and as far as I know they don't get paid any extra. Pretty sure they don't get to set their own hours either.

"Sorry coach, can't play the big game on Sunday, made other plans "

Did they accidentally do something right?