Team Obama's new overtime rule is dehumanizing, economically harmful and must be stopped

Excellent case in point.... One of the guys on my team has a flat this morning. He called and told me, and asked "OK if I just get this taken care of so I don't need to deal with it this weekend?"

Of course it is. Mostly because this guy works his butt off, I'd guess that he was likely online at 6am, and will be online working while he's sitting at the tire place as well. Also because we're all adults here, and life happens.

If I needed to track his hours, though, it gets more complicated. "What time did you start this morning? Will you be working at the tire place? Let me check your schedule to see how many hours you've worked already this week. Were you planning to leave early today? Well...that's out the window." Or, I could just say "No" and be the bad guy. Or make him waste vacation time.

Like I've said, no winners.

If the salaried person is below the threshold, I don't think you would be able to have a different set of vacation/sick day rules for them. You just have to make sure they don't go over 40 hours a week if unwilling to pay over time or increase pay. If a below threshold person has a company smartphone, tablet, laptop, and etc, they may have to give those up or have the IT department limit access to company resources during certain hours.

On a side note the local university raised the pay of all post docs to above threshold levels so they didn't have to deal with the issue. I think most were near the threshold anyway. The average was a $2500 a year raise. I think most universities have done so.

Phew, yeah, that's one way to do it. Raises issues with on-call, and such. For instance, Joe the 37K/year help desk guy works 8-5, and 8-5 only. Ted, the self-important VP wants to check his email at 10pm, locks himself out, and needs his pw changed.

Right now, it's easy. Ted calls Joe, Joe grumbles a little but changes the password. He might come in a little late the next day, or leave early, or whatever. It all works out.

In small companies, without 24-hour help desks, things like this happen weekly. If it happens too much, you set up an oncall rotation (again, working the time out) or wind up hiring extra people (unlikely, easier to ask people to take an extra call or two).

Under the new rules, do we tell Ted to go fish - (hahahaha, he plays golf with the CEO, not gonna happen...)? Pay Joe OT to help infrequent (but must-do) calls, and trust that he's not fudging the calls, or the extra time? Hire extra help to staff the help desk 24 hours a day? Where does the $$$ come from - do we fire Joe and hire two people that we can pay less, because they have less responsibility - no after hours call, no working from home, etc?

No winners. I wonder how places like restaurants, or retail will handle this. Their problems would be exponentially more difficult, I'd think.

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