Btw. Looks like the Great America is woke and hates you for the word 'union' you used in your comment.
There's a problem with your country if you can be fired for refusing overtime.
[a]: This also leads to the employer expecting one to be “on call” 24/7 regardless of your position.
If there's no concept of overtime in most salaried jobs, there's a problem with your country as well.
I'm a salaried, full-time employee and I'm paid to work 37.5 hours a week, no more, no less. And the collective agreement for IT services industry (which is what concerns me as a developer) dictates that 40 hours/week is the maximum.
If you want to read our collective agreement, you can find it here: https://tietoala.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/TES__englanti... Working hours are on page 19 (21 on the PDF).
The reality of the world is that if you're the lead developer for some product you will have times that you need to work off hours. Like if production is down how can you say: "My 40 hours is up this week, I'll look at it on Monday".
It's a balance. You shouldn't routinely be working a ton of nights and weekends. But sometimes shit hits the fan at inconvenient hours and you need to respond. If not, you have to have routine 24/7 coverage which gets really expensive really fast ultimately leading to lower salaries for developers.
If not, then clearly the shit hasn't actually hit any fans and I can keep relaxing on my free time.
Many times companies and clients like to pretend there is an emergency that needs extra hours, but if there is a price tag attached, the urgency disappears really fast.
Overtime is a mutual contract in Finland. The employee can't just decide to do overtime for extra pay (usually 150-200% hourly rate), neither can the company order an employee to do overtime hours. Both agree how many hours are needed and what should be accomplished by working extra hours.
I can _voluntarily_ work longer hours and "bank" those, I'm also free to use my banked hours at a time of my choosing or be compensated for those hours with money. For example I can do 9 hours from monday to thursday and leave at noon on friday for a nice long afternoon/evening with my family.
It depends. If it's the first time production is down and I'm already off, I fix the issue. Once it's fixed I'll tell my manager: "we need on-call people. Please don't consider me for that position because I value more my free-time than money. Thanks". The second time production is down, I won't fix it.
If they fire me because I don't do on-call, then again it depends. I would revisit my contract and if it doesn't say anything about being on-call I would point that out. In any case, I would start to look for a new job asap.
The not-uncommon answer to this is an oncall rotation, where you are paid at some fraction of your full-time salary, to respond to such problems.
The fraction likely works out better than 'overtime' pay, as it's for all the time you are oncall, not just when some issue occurs.
"Tell whoever is on call to deal with it"
Ultimately it changes from paying someone to get a job done to paying them for hours worked. Anyone that's hired a plumber knows that you get far faster and efficient work in the first situation.
Just because people could do something, doesn't mean that they will do it. The people at our company do not spend all of their time making the system more unreliable so that they'd be paid more to be on call. Hell, if you asked the developers, most of them would probably love to spend more time making the system more reliable, but the bosses usually want developers to add more features.
In fact leave is undervalued as a concept by most US employers/employees, various studies have found that workers who take more vacation and work less hours are healthier and more productive. Some progressive companies are starting to learn from this (I spoke to a travel technology company a while ago who will fund you to take a 2 week trip out of the country every year).
Now it seems that true craftsmen are the exception now, people are just hustlers in it for the money. Do it as cheap and fast as possible, bill fas much as you can and off to the next job.
Ultimately there's also a moral aspect of whether the employer owns the whole life of the employee or they are on a more balanced relationship. Anybody who's had to endure micromanagement knows that you get far more engaged and efficient work in the latter situation.
Consider your example: If you pay a tradesperson to 'do a job' you should expect that they will cut every corner available to them that isn't in the contract. If you are paying for time, you might expect them to do a more thorough job. Which is better depends on a number of factors.
Per this view, if a worker worked 100% of their time, they would have achieved their optimum goal of extracting the most wealth possible. But nearly all people who have made that trade would tell you they are depressed, feel run down, and probably think about blowing their brains out on a regular basis.
At some point, the plumber wants to go home, too. Now, maybe it's true that they'll take 1 hour to complete a job at a comfortable rate rather than the fastest-possible rate of 45 minutes, and maybe 4 jobs get completed that day instead of 5 as a result. But it is also true that the 4 jobs may be done with a greater attention to detail. Ever have a maintenance worker track filth into your residence with reckless abandon? What is the value of a more rested, present, and thoughtful worker?
You may argue that for a plumber, there is no value added in that. But I would argue that the value is there, even though the business owner can't extract it as revenue. It is there in the quality of the work, the happiness of the worker, and the happiness of the customer. It makes for a better world, and if you value your employees and customers as people, you'll see that interests are aligned.
All of that said, the economy is a thing. If your business is in a highly competitive market, it's easy to wind up with thin margins in a race to the bottom. But if that's the case, is it not the responsibility of the business management/ownership to either find a way to be competitive short of exploiting workers, or otherwise exit the market and pursue another venture?
At the lowest level, workers will be trained for and work the jobs that are available to them, and the jobs available will be dictated as a function of the the local demand for that service or product. If a small, poorly run, exploitative plumbing company can't find the margins to operate because they are competing with better services, they should cease to exist. The demand will remain the same, and their exit from the market place will result in growth for their competitors, and the jobs will be recreated.
If you are a plumber by trade and run your own plumbing company and can't find a way to exist without exploiting your workers, you should exit the market as a business owner and work for another company. Otherwise, your business isn't plumbing, but exploitation itself.
If you pay someone to get a job done, that's a contractor.
If you pay someone for their hours worked, that's an hourly-waged employee.
If you pay someone a salary, you're paying them to spend their working time, which will typically be around 35-40 hours a week but is not strictly defined or measured, attending to your business needs in whatever ways are agreed between you. It's a quite different relationship, based on a different level of expectations and trust.
To give a specific example: I'm a (European-based) salaried employee of a (US-based) company. Most weeks I spend rather more than 40 hours, one way or another, working on things for my employer, as I (mostly) enjoy my work and want to make the best contribution I can. Sometimes personal stuff comes up, and I may end up spending significantly less, but no-one's keeping track at that level on a day-to-day basis. I don't expect extra money if I work into the evening to finish something I'm involved in, nor do I expect to lose money if I spend the afternoon taking care of a family emergency.
I have in the past had a time-card that I punched when arriving at work, and again when leaving, and my employer paid me for the hours I worked; no more, no less. I'd call that "wages". My current employer pays me an agreed annual sum; it does not depend on the total number of hours I work during the year, but it comes with an expectation of how I will spend my time and expertise. That's a "salary".
Come on, man, it's not your company and if they're not paying you for that time, it's not your responsibility. Volunteering your time for someone else's business? Is this really what you want to do with your life?
The 40 hours is averaged over several weeks (normally). You can have an extra 3 hours, but leave work at lunchtime the next day.
Funny how Europeans are crowing in this thread about how Americans need unions for better pay, but when Americans say they have better pay Europeans just say Americans are obsessed with money.
The obsession with Americans tells a lot about what Europeans think of their system
You can't, if:
1. you have a chronic illness that requires a good healthcare plan to be treated affordably
2. you have a large family
3. your student debt is larger than average
4. you have a large mortgage
5. your have other financial liabilities you can't afford to handle without good paying job
6. you have no retirement savings or they are insufficient
Items 1, 2, 3 and 6 are non-issues in Scandinavian countries.
Most companies try to extract the most value from their employees and this may mean overloading them and they use "industry benchmarks" to set the bar for what you're expected to deliver. Those are very debatable but effective in supporting their point.
Then in the bulk of the push comes from incentivizing people to do overtime by offering promotions, bonuses, good projects only to those who go above and beyond. Refusing overtime may not only be received with a lack of incentives but with concrete disincentives like getting the really nasty activities and treatment. If you're building a career, want the position, or want/need the higher pay, you'll do it. Depends on the company, the job, the person.
Exactly this. If managers notice that your team is doing everything on time, they will remove a member or two from your team, until you can barely meet the deadlines. Then they get a bonus for reducing the company costs.
It requires some experience to realize that it is not your fault if the deadlines are in danger. That is system working exactly as intended. But of course the company will pretend it's your fault. That is also system working exactly as intended. (In USA, this results in you doing a lot of overtime. That is also system working as intended. The urgent situation is not something unexpected; it happens every year in every project, it is a part of the plan.)
I think it’s beautiful your vacation hours are set out, etc.
It seems like there could be some issues if every vertical had one of these (“oh no, the real estate team has 7 weeks of vacation but the HR team only has 2?”) but outside of that it’s beautiful what y’all did as a collective entity. This is super eye opening, thanks for sharing.
The collective point is critical - unions negotiate wages as part of a tripartite arrangement in Finland. It's industry-wide sets of wages.
As others in the thread have pointed out, these types of arrangements don't always correspond to the reality of the business. If you are, for example, paid a yearly bonus, then the concept of "unpaid overtime" doesn't really apply.
I recall a delegate at my Union conference getting very upset at the thought that our members where such low grade / status employees
The Uk is possibly different that no fixed hours has a district class / social status.
Interesting to see a eu style agreemnet
Besides one can't really compare IT jobs in UK and USA. In UK they are generally at lower end of pay and reputation compare to US.
* there's 7% extra that is paid as a lump sum when you change employers, and 33% paid into a retirement account (vs. perhaps 20% for a 401k; employer/employee proportion of 25-75 vs. 50-50 for 401k matching)
* you don't enter work with any debt, because university is paid by the state if you're poor. I have seen directors from America (easily $200k salary) saying they can't afford a vacation in Europe because they have two sons/daughters in grad school.
* you don't have to pay for healthcare (and taxes are comparable for lower income tax brackets). If you have a child, pregnancy+delivery costs €0.00.
* nowhere in Italy are you going to have a real estate market as crazy as Silicon Valley
* childcare will cost 150-500 euros a month depending on age vs 1000-3000$ in the US
Putting everything together, maybe you're paid twice as much. Go to Germany or Finland and there's even less difference.
This used to be true, but has changed in a lot of states and cities in the last decade or so. Many people still think that salaried=work as long as the boss says.
In those places, being salaried doesn't mean you have to work unlimited hours with no compensation. This only applies to managers. If you don't directly manage people, you are legally entitled to overtime. Pre-pandemic, some states were cracking down on this.
It's worth checking your state and city's labor laws every couple of years because things change all the time.
It's clear in the contract how many hours you do for which pay.
Working on Saturday needs to be 150% compensated and Sunday 200%, but I might be wrong on this last part.
In my country, if the contract doesn't mention overtime, that's great, because it means the company must pay you nicely for overtime, and there is a limited amount of overtime per year. However, if it is explicitly a part of the contract, there may be more overtime per year (within some limits), and less compensation per extra hour (again, within some limits). So if you find overtime mentioned in your contract, that is a bad thing.
I'm just one atypical person, but in my experience, the employer is usually more nervous about the employee breaking things off than the employee.
If a company expects you to crunch, that means there’s too much work. If there’s too much work, it’s extremely unlikely that somebody doing a decent job would be fired.
Someday maybe our betters in Europe will understand that the American experience with unions is different than that of Europeans. And that American unions are a very different animal. Until that time, though, keep thinking we're just idiots.
In ways that no one should be proud of, and anyone with a conscience should at least recognize needs redressing-even if the outcomes are things they as an individual wouldn't directly benefit from.
"At-will employment" laws mean that the burden of proof for the cause of firing is on the employee, rather than the employer. This gives free rein to employer's to fire workers considering unionizing, so long as there is the barest pretext of another cause. As forming a union becomes economically risky, unions decline, or fail to form in new industries.
Unions have been attacked in the US, through explicit policies meant to defund unions, and to prevent unions from forming.
A short googling for for "history of workplace safety in the us" reveals that unions had a hand in at least that. Probably in several other things you take for granted.
In my opinion it's a mistake to think that things like that cannot deteriorate away after they've been achieved once.
Just the stories about how union work is handled on US movie sets is just baffling. Directors can't even touch the lights without an Official Light Mover Union member doing it. If they do, all union people will just walk off set and that's the end of it.
In most European countries unions are more about collectively agreeing to some basic rules like wage, hours worked and other compensations.
Or just some balls. Don’t work more than you want to - either your employer will deal with it or you go find a new job. Not a big deal.
I work fewer hours than the median person at my company and I don’t think it has negatively impacted me much or at all. Any time someone tries to get me to do something that would require working additional hours I just say no or take extra vacation days in lieu (eg if I need to do something for a few hours on Saturday - I take an extra vacation day to make up. If it’s not worth it for the company, it doesn’t really need to get done on sat). Literally the worst case is you get fired, but probably nothing will happen.
That said, burnout can make working harder worse than working a sane amount. But that doesn’t fall on the employer as much as the employee.
That is highly dependent on when the new employee is added to the project. If it's done early (as a result of proper planning), it's most likely not gonna hurt.
But with reasonable amount of people, if you start with the full team at the beginning, you can assign different responsibilities to different people. For example, one can do database, one can do web API, one can do web design, one can do integration with other systems, one can build and maintain continuous integration; you can also divide the domain knowledge among multiple people. Each person can focus on doing their part in such way that the others do not need to understand every single detail, and only use the agreed API.
However, if you add a new person late in the project... all simple things were probably already done, and all difficult things require a lot of knowledge about the existing code, that other team members already know, but if they spend their time explaining it to the new member, then their own work gets slower, so the overall speed reduces. (And yes, given enough time, the new member would learn everything and become just as productive as the old members. But the thing is, there is not enough time left at that moment.)
I was referring to my 40 hours ending on Friday at 5, and not returning to work until Monday morning. If management expects more from me then they need to hire more people or lower their retirement or delivery expectations.
Do you realise in some fields work not getting completed on time could in some cases cause people to die?
Sometimes there is an emergency, and a professional saying 'sorry nope on vacation your fault for not having enough people to cover every eventuality' just isn't reasonable.
I'm sure there are jobs where this is true. I'm also sure it's not for 99.9% of people here.
Don't guilt people who happen to have lifesaving jobs for taking vacations.
In many cases taking that job means accepting you may be forced to come in and work. Often called 'unlimited liability' for example. If you can't accept that, then leave the job to someone who can.
> The buck stops somewhere.
In this case apparently it's fine for it to stop with a dead person.
People that do a job where they can save lives accept the fact that saving lives is not granted.
People don't die because someone is slacking.
Do you realize how stupid that sounds?
Not sure where you read this argument?
Free time is a right
If someone dies during your free time it's not your responsibility
Besides: US have the worst life expectation of the whole west.
You should ask yourself why.
I'm not apologising for anything. I never said anything about 'slacking'? Just confused where you got this idea.
> If someone dies during your free time it's not your responsibility
This isn't reality - look at how people criticise presidents who are golfing during a national crisis where people are dying.
> US have the worst life expectation of the whole west
This article is about the EU isn't it? What's the US got to do with it?
> You should ask yourself why.
I don't know why the US does anything. Why do I need to explain it?
Isn't the job of a president to handle crisis?
The job of a doctor is not to prevent any death, just those that they can prevent during their work hours.
> What's the US got to do with it?
Because they are the champions of working non stop and yet their results when it really matters (you brought up saving lives) are worse than anybody else
Do you think he stops handling the crisis at 5pm? No? Why do you think not?
Hints:
how many presidents any country has?
And who put them there?
Do they send CVs and get selected after a black board interview where they have to invert a binary tree?
How often do you believe people get asked to work extra hours to save lives in imminent danger? 1 in 10000?
This law would cover other 9999 cases.
The issue is escalated through different support levels up to the on-call person, if they can't handle it then MAYBE people are bothered during their vacation.
Or if production breaks at 1600 on a friday night, I can maybe work extra hours to solve the issue if it looks like I'm essential to solving it. It just means that I'm coming later on monday to make up for the hours.
It may not be the decision people will make, it may be an ethical quagmire etc etc but you can't just expect people to keep working past their limits forever.
There need to be reasonable bounds.
It doesn't work like that.
> Sometimes there is an emergency, and a professional saying 'sorry nope on vacation
Why are they relying on someone that is on vacation in the first place?
Are firemen supposed to not go on holiday ever during their work life?
That's simply the symptom of very bad management and on a larger scale of a very disfunctional society.
Sometimes there are only so many people who can solve a problem and society can't afford to have an excess number of them sitting around doing nothing in case there is an emergency.
> Are firemen supposed to not go on holiday ever during their work life?
Firemen, police, politicians, military, are all subject to getting recalled from leave if there is an emergency and they are needed to prevent life being lost. Nobody ever said they can't ever go on leave.
> That's simply the symptom of very bad management
No it's reality!
Look at how many people criticise presidents who are 'golfing' when there is a crisis and life is being lost.
Some people just need to be able to respond no matter what.
That's a very small subset of the entire workforce.
Maybe one in a million or less
> No it's reality!
It's not.
> Look at how many people criticise presidents who are 'golfing' when there is a crisis and life is being lost.
They are right.
The president is not a salaried worker, it's the president.
He works. He draws a salary. What do you think the difference is?
Why can't the Vice President delegate out of hours? Because that's not realistic? Well there you go... sometimes it's not realistic.
Well... Let's say that if I have to explain it too you, we have bigger issues to solve first.
> Why can't the Vice President delegate out of hour
Because that's not how it works
By the law
Applies for ordinary people as well - such as soldiers and police who are liable for recall at any time.
In my country they have 28 days of paid holidays every year
Ant it's still one of the few jobs left where they can retire after 15 years, 6 months, one day of work
> Police
In my country they have 28 days of paid holidays, 35 hours a week contract
In my country there are 1/10 of the homicides per 100 thousands people of the US
They are not liable if they don't go to work on their free time, ever.
Healthcare, public transportation, firemen, etc. they can't not provide the service, it's called (sorry the bad translation) "interruption of public service"
Yes, they can be re-called on duty, but it happens rarely.
They are payed extra time if that happens (sometimes the hourly pay is double of the regular one)
Soldiers can't even be sent on a war mission if they don't volunteer to it.
They usually do because the pay is astronomical (4-5 times the regular one, sometimes more)
But they are not supposed to.
They can still not show if they have reason: in this 2020 for example being COVID positive or simply sick.
It happened the opposite this year, many doctors and nurses volunteered to help.
They are employees of the State after all and they serve the public.
In the private sector you have to be compensated for working extra hours, if they don't, the employers are liable.
If they ask you to work on your free time, a judge could (and usually does) condemn the employer and the employee gets a compensation.
My parents worked for the national healthcare and when my mom was expecting me, she discovered she had a condition that caused two previous miscarriages.
My parents worked shift of 12 hours 5 days straight, they assumed it was too taxing on the body of a pregnant woman with a condition, so between me and my sister the hospital put her on paid sick leave for 36 months.
My country is Italy, our salaries are lower than countries like US where such protections don't exist, but at least we are protected from abuses (they still happen of course, but it's a risk for the employer)
One of the benefit of the system is that people know they have rights and will stand up for them
If you accept to work gratis in your free time, you're doing a disservice to the entire category.
Of course there are people abusing of these rights, but in general it's a good tradeoff that benefits the larger population instead of rewarding only the workaholics.
And don't even get me started on why being a workaholic society is bad for those who can't work more because they are not in good health or worse...
It's also kind of a mediocre bandaid for deeper social problems. An employer that can get away with asking you to do unreasonable amounts of work, work ridiculous hours, or achieve impossible feats OR ELSE probably doesn't have much market competition.
Also a quote from C.S. Lewis:
“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Insisting that support for unions and support for UBI must be linked is the same energy as insisting that more tightly restricting what food stamp recipients can buy is "helping" them.
But they are completely different approaches to this problem. For example, unions do not protect unemployed people, while UBI protects everyone. On the other hand, a union is something you could create tomorrow at your workplace without waiting for the rest of the country to change their minds.
In some sense, they are competing solutions, because if we had UBI, unions would be less necessary, because everyone who feels abused would have the opportunity to walk away... without ruining their life.
Many people have a very simple-minded view of both politics and the world in general, which leads them to a low-resolution model that lumps things into two massive buckets and assume that everyone else takes their set of beliefs wholesale from one of the buckets.
And CS Lewis is no expert. He's a preacher.
>The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated.
We wouldn't have any billionaires if this was even remotely true. If having 999 million dollars doesn't satiate you, I submit there is no amount of money that will. We look down on hoarders who fill their house with old newspapers and knickknacks but when it's money hoarding we lionize it.
Then the work doesn't get completed on time! That's bad management not hiring enough people, not the fault of the employee. SMH y'all IT people need a union.