I never said otherwise. But most businesses stay on the edge of managing those circumstances for their entire existence, which goes back to my original statement. It can be VERY difficult to hire good help. The difficulty is always there, on a variety of fronts. Sometimes it's what you can afford to pay. Sometimes it's a lack of talent. Sometimes it's the cost of training the talent you already have. Sometimes it's a reduction in the demand for the goods and services you provide. But very, very seldom in the business world does money grow on trees and just come in from no where. You throw out these one-liners as if it's so simple, but the things you are saying are solutions at all. That's what makes your comments glib. I'm not trying to be offensive. I'm just wondering what your point is I guess.
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Ever been ripped-off by your own boss...?
- Thread starter Spinal Tapper
- Start date
As an example, my former company's laboratory routinely did testing on samples from other companies who didn't have labs. Sometimes it was put on priority over our own work. The technicians did the work and got paid for it the same as when they did our own work. No one ever complained about it.
This is why, as a skilled laborer, I would never accept a salaried position again. I don't dispute what you are saying here, but I am curious as to where the line might be drawn between reasonable and unreasonable use of a salaried employee's time. From some of the opinions I see in this thread, if an employer tells you to head over to his sister's house to paint the shutters at 5 pm, then that just falls into the "miscellaneous/other" category of your job description and that's all there is to it.
What stops it quite simply is that only a fool would take a person they're paying $50,000 a year to and have them do a job they can pay someone minimum wage for.
I manage highly trained and well paid engineers. If I didn't give them work suitable for highly trained and well payed engineers I would not be using my employer's money wisely and would not keep my job very long.
I'm salaried and as a salaried management employee my job is to use the assets entrusted to me to further the organizations goals. If that means I work 10-12 hour days sometimes or a string of weekends so be it. If my management chooses to not recognize that at raise/bonus/promotion time then I'm free to sell my skills to someone else.
Well said. Also, those highly trained engineers probably have their own standards and expectation in mind with regard to self fulfillment and actualization of happiness from the workplace. They might do remedial tasks in the short term, but most of them would look elsewhere if they weren't able to do what they are trained to do. This is also another aspect of finding the right people for the job you need done, which can be difficult. You can pay someone more money to do something they hate, but how long are they going to stick with it, or how much is that task really worth to the employer? Finding folks who enjoy their work, are passionate about doing it and doing it well, and want to bring their personal prosperity goal inline with that of the company's is the key. You can usually pay these individuals a handsome but fair salary and they'll be happy, which promotes high company moral. Locating those individuals and weeding out the chaff in interviews is an art form, and can be very daunting at times even for the best of the best. The business section of any bookstore is full of books on the subject, and thousands of businesses close their doors everyday because they can't figure it out. The companies that remain afloat will continue to deal with it, some better than others, but it's never a set-it-and-forget thing.
With all due respect, I believe that you have created a separate and unrelated question and answered that instead of
addressing the point that I am making. I am not new to the job market, and I am not asking specifics about engineers making $50,000 a year.
What I am wondering is this: if a person is paid (x) amount of dollars a week with no overtime and their duties do not end at 40 hours, at what point does the employer NOT own them?
I understand what you are saying, but gross abuses like the example you gave just aren't likely. More common is what the OP just went through...usually gray areas where you are doing something within your skillset. Usually salaried positions don't involve manual labor also, but rather folks are paid because of their intellectual knowledge which the company hopes to incorporate into their own intellectual property. To add to this, usually salaried employees aren't as bound to the employer as are hourly workers because they have skills that let them more readily seek employment elsewhere, and the loss of the employee is more impacting than is an hourly worker. This is not always the case of course. There are all kinds of ways an employee can gain leverage with his employer.
I know some hourly workers at an industrial facility in town that are required to work overtime when asked. They can only turn it down so many times in a month before it will cost them their job. So being salaried isn't the only way an employer can abuse you.
LiquidMidnight said:
All I kept hearing in this response was a whiny voice in my head saying "it's not my fault I'm not employed" ...whatever... Lazys gotta be lazy. Adapt and overcome or get the hell out of the way of the rest of us that take responsibility for ourselves.
Just to give you some background, I spent the first half of my career in a salaried, corporate environment and experienced very little in the way of excessive time demands and was always treated fairly. All in all, I probably averaged about 40 hours a week.
The last half of my career has been as a skilled craftsman in high-end woodworking and more recently as a technician in a custom prosthetic lab. Both of these jobs require skill sets that are WAY harder to come by (and harder to perfect) than most office positions. I have generally been paid for these jobs on an hourly basis because these are the fields where I have encountered a higher-than-average amount of bosses who seem to believe that they outright "own" their employees if they are on the payroll.
So my question still remains, at what point does an employer cease to "own" his or her employee if they are salaried?
So you do not believe in labor markets? Is that what you would say to someone who's manufacturing job was just sent overseas?
So if the OP is going to take away anything from this thread it's............Work Union. Live Better. 
bolophonic said:
Absolutely
Because at the end of the day they and their family has to eat and complaining about the industry outsourcing their job or scrounging for however long to find that exact same job somewhere else (definition of insanity) is in my opinion just silly... Get to work. Build up another skill... Were you screwed over? Yeah... Probably... And that sucks, and maybe theres something they and all if us can do to keep those jobs here in the future... But Is complaining about it and whining everyday about how someone else ruined your life going to put food on the table? No... Get up and do what you have to do to be self-reliant.
This idea of "oh I cant get a job because the market isn't giving me the exact perfect opportunity that I think I deserve" is BS. Times change, markets change... Adapt, overcome and thrive... That's what we've always done throughout history and modern times are no different.
If you guys want to disagree that's more than fine... I'd prefer getting to work fixing the problem than complaining that it's too hard.
To me it's all facets of the same question. You can't abuse good employees for long and expect them to stay. I'm pretty much completely within my rights to have my people work more than 40 hours a week or constantly adjust their start-stop times but even in a down job market how long do you think good people will put up with that? I stand to lose a lot if I lose a good engineer. It upsets the group dynamic and it may take months to find and more months to bring up to speed a replacement. I can't afford for that to happen very often.
I do ask my people to put in more hours when the job requires it but on the other end I have no problem with folks leaving early or coming in late or taking a couple of "mental health days" when needed. It all seems to work out in the end and as long as the job gets done everybody's happy. Are there idiots out there who treat salaried employees like slaves?
I'm sure there are. I've never run into one though and I expect they don't last very long.
Exactly. My folks owned and ran one of the most successful furniture manufacturing businesses in Australia, when Chinese imports took off the market died completely and an entire industry in Australia collapsed.
So they went and did something else. It's a slightly different situation, as they're self employed, but it's he same principal. Demands change a dry up, move an adapt with the times, sure, it might not be "fair" or even "reasonable", but life's not fair. We had a lot of employees who'd worked for us for years, many of them had come straight out of school into apprenticeships and their entire workplace experience from whoa to go was in an industry that no longer existed. So they went and did something else, some learned new skills, others used their existing skills in different applications. There was no use looking for a job doing the same old thing, they didn't exist, Chinese companies were doing the work for literally no money at the time. Sure, we could all complain all we wanted about how the government should have done this and that to protect our jobs, and we'd have been right, but it doesn't make any difference. Damage is done, jobs are gone, too little too late, chalk it up as a lesson learned and move onto something else.
I feel for people who are in a position where their skills are no longer needed, or the industry they work in has outsourced all their jobs overseas or with machines, but in cases like this there is only one option.
Matter of fact it if you show up on someones doorstep with a good appearance, good attitude and a passable resume 2 or 3 days a week, sooner or later their either going to recognise you're value, or you're simply going to rock up on a day where they need an extra pair of hands.
Listen, I don't know what your education level is, but even the most conservative, austere economist would agree that there is more to employment than the talk radio lecture you just recited.
