You always hear the phase “9 to 5” and also the song with the same name. Assuming you include 1 hour worth of breaks (30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks), you’re only working for 7 hours a day which comes up to 35 hours a week.
Now it feels like you have to work 8 hours a day (for a total of 40 hours of actual work), plus your other time off meaning you’re really there for 9 hours each day (for a total of 45 hours). Am i looking at that wrong, or did expected times change, and if so, when?
Everything changed. You’re not crazy. If you watch movies made before the 2000s about office culture, including the movie 9 to 5, you can see that the hours included a lunch break. Which was paid.
Yes, those of the older generation had it easier in every way.
Is this a US thing? Do you not get paid for your lunch hour? That’s wild.
Most people don’t. So, for an average employee, it would be 9-530 to account for their unpaid 30m lunch required by law.
In the US, you’re lucky if you get paid for the hours you work. And many don’t get all of their hours paid.
In the US, it’s Salary, not Hourly. It’s not “getting paid for the time”, you get paid for doing the job you agreed to do.
That’s just salaried folks though. The vast majority of american workers are hourly or contractors. Per the Dept of Labor’s own site:
The Wage and Hour Division is dedicated to protecting and enhancing the welfare of the nation’s workforce with a focus on low-wage, underserved workers. In fiscal year 2023, we successfully recovered over $274 million in back wages and damages for more than 163,000 workers nationwide.
Wage theft is when employers don’t properly pay their employees and is a HUGE problem because it isn’t always out of malevolence, it can be as simple as the time clock not properly computing overtime, etc.
If you don’t think that $274 million is large amount, think about how the vast majority of these things never get reported to the authorities; that number should be higher.
Source for quote: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/data
Most salaried workers are written up if they fail to work 8+ hours. Salaried is now just a method to deny people overtime - fancied salaried workers may still operate in the intended way but even most developers I know have to obey some sort of time tracking method.
Spaniard here. Not only does my company not pay me for lunch time. It also demands it to be at least 30 minutes long. How is it even legal to force my unpaid time to be a minimum amount?
It’s probably a law. Mandatory minimum breaks make perfect sense for factory workers.
Those old tv shows where they casually eat breakfast before work make more sense. They weren’t up at 6, rushing to get to work by 8. They had a whole hour more.
They also had someone to make it for them. One income was enough for the household.
USA. Been working 20 years. Every job has been 8 to 5, unpaid 1h lunch, 2x15min paid breaks. :(
The last time I worked hourly was the late 90s. We got a paid 15 break per 4 hours worked. If we worked more than 6 hours, we also got an unpaid 30 minute lunch. I got no benefits because I was part-time at 37.5 hours per week.
37.5 hours
part-time
crazy, in my world that’s pretty much full time
if someone tried to dictate the amount of work hours that I put in during the day I would just start puking and shitting
I’m pretty sure it’s in your contract of employment
not if you’re a wizard
You’re thinking small-time, like an hourly worker. Good office jobs are generally salaried positions and the idea of clocking in and out is… not a thing. Some days you work more, some less, whatever needs to be done. The idea of 9-5 is just a general time frame. And no one gives a shit when you lunch or break. In a real profession the yardstick is, are you getting it done or not?
I’ll catch grief for saying that, so I’ll preempt by saying, if your job isn’t like that, you likely have a shit job.
Gentle reminder that without “small time”, hourly workers doing real labor your easy, sweatless, office job would disappear overnight. Perhaps some gratitude? Maybe even some solidarity?
As a former IT professional turned baker, I dislike the condescending attitude too many white collar workers have toward the actual wheel turners of the world.
“doing real labor” “easy, sweatless, office job” “the actual wheel turners”
“I dislike the condescending attitude”
It never ceases to amaze me how often people see and hate shit in other people that they epitomize themselves.
And honestly, my experience has been the opposite and I see the condescending attitude, at least more openly, coming from blue collar workers more often.
I’m a capitalist and this thread is giving me a hard-on
I have a salaried position. I don’t clock in. But it’s typically only used to deny us overtime pay. If I work 35 hours a week, I’m paid 12.5% less than my colleagues who do 40. And if my lunch break is too long, I’m expected to stay late sometime within the month to compensate.
And while I do have a shit job (save me) I’ve never seen someone whose employer didn’t mind their hours as long as they got shit done.
Mine doesn’t give a fuck how long we work.
You cannot be salaried and deducted hours you don’t work.
Either you are hourly, and paid for the hours you actually work, or you’re salaried, and paid regardless of how many hours you work.
What your employer is doing is illegal, and wage theft.
This is so common in Quebec that I have trouble believing it’s illegal. I think it might be a loophole.
Or they do it anyway and hope they just won’t get caught.
And even if they do get caught, the likely punishment is just paying out the wages they owe, so why not chance it? Fines don’t scale based on revenue, profit, or even damages, if there even are fines.
How do they know when you’re not working your full 40 if you aren’t clocking in or out? I’m not familiar with Canadian labor law so you may very well be right, but it is kind of hard to imagine a legal pay structure where they can dock you for working fewer hours but don’t compensate you for working more.
Friendly reminder that wage theft is very common and just because lots of people are breaking the law doesn’t mean it’s actually legal. For example in the States, there is a fairly narrow definition of which jobs qualify as overtime exempt but go to a jobs board and you’ll find pretty much anything under the sun. Many employees are incorrectly classified as exempt and are completely unaware they are even entitled to overtime pay.
Well they don’t know know, but there are signs. For one, we fill in timesheets, and lying on them is a no-no. I could probably get away with stretching the truth a little, but if they notice I only commit between X and Y time, or that I’m seldom available for developer questions at a particular time, they might get suspicious and investigate my hours.
As for overtime… Well I think how companies handle it is they don’t actually ask us to stay late; they just give us unrealistic targets that kinda require overtime unless you’re a god if we ever complained they’d say they never asked for us to stay late.
We used to be able to accumulate time indefinitely and take time off according to the bank of extra time we’d worked, but once, someone accumulated hundreds of hours and just left on an unplanned vacation for nearly a full month and they really didn’t like that. So now, you need to work your quota (which you can have them adjust to your capabilities; 30, 35, 40…) on average every month. So, sure, I can work only 20 hours one week, but that’s 15 hours of extra time I need to do within that month.
And if you have extra at the end of the month, well, that’s lost.
Which sucks, because I used to use those as sick days over the legally required two paid ones we get per year; my health isn’t exactly resplendent.
You cannot be salaried and deducted hours you don’t work.
You would think that. And yet, the US… Finds a way. I’d rather not doxx myself by getting into it further, but it’s definitely not illegal where I am.
Not illegal, as in you’ve actually gone through this with a lawyer, or not illegal, as in your company does it anyway?
Because Federally, being salaried does not work like you describe: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17g-overtime-salary
Working less hours in a day is not valid reason to deduct pay. Working less full days is. (From the source above)
State law does not trump federal law, unless explicitly called out. It’s just that federal law is actually pretty lax regarding most things and states are more restrictive.
As a guy with an actual office job. It’s usually 8-5 or 9-6 with an hour lunch, plus whatever time you spend on coffee or whatever.
It’s pretty standard, and it’s been that way for a couple decades at least.
