Hello! I’m curious on if/how the following is legal.
I work for a multibillion dollar company with 32000 employees. I’m remote, located in Texas, and I’m on salary (after being hourly for 6 years- 8 years with company). Twice a year, we have inventory- my issue is that the Friday and Saturday of inventory weekend, we’re expected to work our normal hours (8am-5pm) then arrive at our designated branch to assist with inventory, which sometimes means staying as late as 1am on Friday and coming in from 6am-??? On Saturday. Most hourly workers are exempt from this starting last year, to cut costs I imagine, but being salary means I get no overtime/additional compensation for working these much longer days, and I’m required to work inventory and not allowed to request off during this time. I don’t get any of the time back the following week.
I couldn’t imagine a company this large would do something blatantly illegal, so I’m wondering how it’s legal to have associates work 12+ hour days.
Inventory months always give me such high anxiety (which is already bad for me) and not knowing how long/late I’ll be working makes it so much worse, on top of just having to work for that long. I really value my personal time and draw a hard line for my work-life balance.
It really frustrated me when I learned most of the hourly associates were exempt, because if we salaried associates need to stay until 1am, obviously the more help we’d get the sooner we’d get off. I’m just really frustrated with this and management is no help, other associates say “it’s just how it has always been”, but that’s not a good answer for me.
I don’t even work in the warehouse/etc so I always have to stop someone multiple times who works in that area and ask questions.
Does anyone else deal with this?