Before anyone says this is illegal and fucked up – she is well aware. I’m more curious if anyone’s ever heard of it before.
When my roommate was hired by a recruiting agency about a year ago (global, probably 250-500 employees), she was working 10 hour days, Monday thru Thursday. For many people, including her, that worked better than 40 hours spread over 5 days.
However, within a month of starting, her company mandated that associates work on Friday as well – 8 additional hours, putting her at 48/week. When she asked her boss what’s going on and what the overtime pay would be, they responded that the extra 8 hours (at time and a half) are baked into her “salary”
I put “salary” in quotes. It isn’t a salary. She’s a non-exempt employee being paid hourly. However, the “overtime” puts her over the yearly income threshold in terms of how much a non-exempt employee would make before being classified as exempt. She’s pressed upper management about it pretty extensively to no avail, mostly getting some form of “yeah it’s a weird pay structure, I don’t really understand it either but we get paid either way.”
The most obvious explanation would be that they do this to avoid providing the benefits that come with being an exempt employee, even though it was described as a salary in her job interview. In addition, using that to “mandate” overtime is unconscionable if not illegal.
There’s a litany of shady stuff going on that isn’t worth getting into (commissions treated as bonuses so they can be withheld from employees for any number of reasons, etc.) but the “salary” aspect certainly stands out the most. Just wanted to know if anyone had heard of something like this before