Company moved many employees from salary to hourly with no warning (interviewed, unemployment)
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Me and my entire team came into this startup with a poorly defined role and being promised opportunities to work on meaningful projects, even though 99% of our day is working on administrative BS. Every month we were told the same lies that once the product matured more the administrative work would be outsourced and we would move into projects. Out of nowhere, a team was created and outside talent was hired to work on these projects, and my team was suddenly shifted to hourly instead of salary. Across the company, all entry level employees working on administrative, low level work were shifted. This bothers me for 3 reasons:
1) Our salary would match a 50 hour work week. Yes, 10 hours of overtime are mandatory if we want to maintain our current salary...is this even legal?
2) The fact that we were told the lie of moving on to more meaningful work in the future if we toughed it out now only to have the meaningful work be taken by a newly defined team of new hires, essentially forcing us into obsoletion. We had a meeting today regarding this situation and so many idiots were drinking the koolaid by management that hourly was good; meanwhile only a select few could see that this was the beginning of the end: salary to hourly, hourly to part time, then cya later.
3) The busiest time in our industry is Quarter 4, which just ended last week. So essentially they waited until after everyone did 60-70 hour work weeks on salary before implementing hourly wages in the least busy quarter of the year.
I have never encountered such unethical practices from a company. I spoke to many people who were forced into hourly roles today that are not entry level and ALL of them told me about how when they encountered this before, morale across the board dropped immensely. Anyone else had this happen before?
Unfortunately, it's just another example of the duplicity and manipulativeness of the "corporate" world brought to a new low. One more reason why I have never felt comfortable when asked to work for a "straight"? salary ..... and never will.
I'm sorry for the situation you've be put in. It is yet another example of how our society values the commercial economy and refuses to value the labor economy - too many people think money is more important than people. Regardless, it is unlikely that your company did anything that violated either standard practices or the law. Unless you had a written employment contract (in which case the tenets therein would prevail) or there are witnessed statements of promises made in such a way that they would be unequivocal, you're probably looking at a situation where your employer has simply made a change and you have a choice to accept it or move on.
Your employer can require you to work overtime and can fire you if you refuse, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act or FLSA (29 U.S.C. § 201 and following), the federal overtime law.
It doesn't matter that you would have to work longer to make the same money you were making previously except in the context of perhaps justifying an unemployment claim. However, the reduction in pay would have to be "significant" and given that you were switched from salaried to hourly it would be very difficult to prove that this was a "significant" change, if your employer wishes to put forward the idea that the salaried employees were expected to work 60-70 hours a week as you alluded to yourself (something which is not uncommon in "startups").
I'm not sure if the actual switch in status, from exempt to non-exempt, constitutes a "significant" change to justify unemployment, but again all it would mean if it did is that you could claim unemployment insurance and walk away from the job (probably with a bad reference).
You need to be very careful about calling anything a "lie" unless you have documentary proof that something was said, that it was said knowingly, that it was presented to you as a reliable representation, and that what was said was clearly false rather than just being a muddier version of the truth. If anywhere in what was said to you the word "if" was used, you're probably looking at a muddier version of the truth rather than a "lie".
The timing of the change is also not unusual. I was just reading an article about how some major retail chains just announced a number of upcoming store closures. Of course they're going to wait until the biggest retail sales season is over before shuttering their retail establishments. There's nothing strange about that, and surely nothing actionable, given today's relatively worker-insensitive employment laws.
While it isn't much solace, I know, please know that you're not alone: A lot of other people encounter bad situations such as what you've encountered.
Me and my entire team came into this startup with a poorly defined role and being promised opportunities to work on meaningful projects, even though 99% of our day is working on administrative BS.
Time to start reading up on exempt vs. non-exempt laws. It's possible that none of you should have been salaried in the first place and that they owe you a ton of overtime.
Time to start reading up on exempt vs. non-exempt laws. It's possible that none of you should have been salaried in the first place and that they owe you a ton of overtime.
This was my first thought as well..... Someone told them they were out of compliance and this change has come about to cover their butts.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Suncc49
This was my first thought as well..... Someone told them they were out of compliance and this change has come about to cover their butts.
Since the OP mentions "entry level" and "administrative BS" they definitely do not appear to qualify as salaried jobs. The Department of Labor and IRS would both be interested in a situation like this.
There are classifications for salaried and hourly.
Here in NJ if they miss classified you and moved you from salaried to hourly they have to pay you overtime for 2 years prior.
Look at your states web page for employment laws.
You all are very sharp. YES, we were even told by management that this was for "legal reasons". We were also told that our startup's law firm on retainer interviewed every manager in the company to define their team's individual roles for this purpose. This is in California.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemlock140
Since the OP mentions "entry level" and "administrative BS" they definitely do not appear to qualify as salaried jobs. The Department of Labor and IRS would both be interested in a situation like this.
The reason we were given was that since the company was started, many of the roles WE now occupy and do administrative work used to involve much more personal discretion since the startup was much smaller a year ago. So roles with the same title would have been much more involved in the past than now. Would this not be difficult to prove to the Dept of Labor and IRS? They could easily waive it off as "we became compliant as soon as the roles were clearly defined". I am definitely interested in bringing it to their attention regardless.
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