Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
When I was younger, I was very excited about the idea of going from being an hourly employee to being a salaried employee. Getting a salary instead of wages meant you were Getting Up There!
Nope.
Getting a salary instead of wages means you get a constant amount no matter how many hours you put in, so your corporate overlords can feel comfortable asking you to overwork yourself for no additional compensation.
@noelle Your work contract doesn't set a fixed number of weekly hours? Over here (Belgium) the de facto standard for salaried employees is to work 38h per week; overtime is either paid separately or converted to paid days off, or both.
@jkb There's no legal standard in the US and companies will routinely exploit this. It's especially true in the software-development industry, where 7-day, 100-hour "crunch weeks" aren't uncommon but don't draw any extra pay.
@noelle @jkb There is actually a legal standard for this, it just sucks.
https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17a_overview.htm
At least the law was updated in 2016 to raise the floor from $455/wk to a minimum of 40th percentile of full-time non-hourly worker wages in the lowest wage Census Region ($913 as of 2016), and with automatic update provisions starting in 2020.
But that's still really low for a lot of areas, tbh...
And, the Highly Compensated Employees rule was updated the same way, and is now $134,004.
