What are you supposed to do if your employment contract says you’re exempt (meaning no overtime pay)?

I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt".

> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.

Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.

In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.

Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.

From my contract, there is no overtime pay. Overtime has to be given as free time within a specific amount of time after the overtime occurred.

But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.

But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.

So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.

No overtime payment specified in mine, either. The usual thing is to "fall back" to what the law says, and that's what I've seen mostly everywhere. Maybe in other sectors this is negotiated differently, though; apart from the grounds laid by law, a set of sector-specific collective agreements might have been set up in the past for different sectors, further improving or detailing their particular work conditions.

Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)

FYI, it goes both ways. An exempt employee chooses their own hours. If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.

> If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.

This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”

Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.

Are you sure?

This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/2006...

> Are you sure?

Yes.

> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise

That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”

Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”

But the employer chooses what needs to be done and the time frame for completion. You can choose whatever hours will let you complete the assigned work. Just complete it or you're fired.

> The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.

The term for this is “at will employment” and in most started it is the default law.

Meaning that your employment can be terminated by the employer for any reason or no reason at all, without notice.

As in, security coming to your desk and escorting you through the door.

Look it up.

I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).

Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|

It’s supposed to work both ways - I work 60 hours this week with the implicit understanding that I work 20 next week. Sure, I don’t get OT pay, but I can abide by that as long as it all balances out to 2000 hours at the end of the year.

That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.

The problem is that unlike with proper overtime protection, it's just an implicit understanding that is in no way guaranteed.

Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.

I have a very simple philosophy `no pay no work`. It is about having self respect.

'If you're good at something, never do it for free'

Look for another job. Developers have enough leverage in the job market that there's no need to put up with bad working conditions unless they want to.

Don’t work overtime?