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Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 34: Candy's Comdex freakout
By Thomas Scoville
[07/10/99]

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The Web can't make racists
But it can help expose them and their ideas to the light of the truth.
By Scott Rosenberg
[07/09/99]

The education of Alice
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[07/08/99]

Dangling conversations
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[07/07/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 33: Steve draws a bead on The Man
By Thomas Scoville
[07/07/99]

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"I had one job where I was paged by the system when it was working properly at 10 p.m., midnight and 3 a.m.," says Doris Beers, a systems administrator at Janus Associates. "I got to where I could tell in my sleep whether it was an 'everything is working fine' page or a 'problem' page."

Beers is one of an army of tech industry workers who have grown used to being available to their jobs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The reward for such sacrifice can be mega-wealth, if the company's stock soars and the employee has lots of options vested. But if the business isn't one of the few to make it big or the employee doesn't own a chunk of shares, the long hours don't add up to much more than stress and exhaustion.

The majority of tech workers take home no overtime pay for their round-the-clock efforts. Why not? Many are entitled to it, but they don't know the law or, bizarre as it sounds, they care less about the extra money than their reputation. They want to be perceived as professionals, not low-level, hourly wage hounds.

Contrary to popular belief, overtime earnings have nothing to do with job title or salary status; many salaried workers are eligible for overtime. In general, overtime eligibility is determined by the duties and responsibilities of the job. A lot of tech workers could see a sweet increase in their paychecks if they just knew the rules and demanded that their employers followed them.

The "rules," however, are rather arcane. The federal legislation that governs overtime eligibility is the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a relatively archaic and terribly complicated statute written in 1938. Rather than specify who is eligible for overtime benefits, the FLSA states who isn't eligible -- "executives," "administrators" and "professionals."

It's the job of the Department of Labor to interpret these broad categories. It has ruled that "executives" manage other employees, "administrators" spend more than 50 percent of their time making policy decision and "professionals" have completed an advanced education, like medical school. But even such sweeping exemptions leave a lot of employees eligible for overtime.

To cut down on overtime costs, lobbyists for various industries have leaned on Congress during the six decades that the act has been in place. They have managed to create 20 pages of exemptions to the FSLA, including one -- added three years ago -- specifically aimed at tech workers. Section 13[a][17] denies overtime benefits to systems analysts, programmers, engineers or other "similarly skilled workers." But it doesn't include trainees or most entry-level employees at high-tech companies -- and it doesn't mean all tech workers are out of luck when it comes to overtime pay.

The state of California, home to hundreds of thousands of high-tech workers, doesn't recognize the federal exemption at all. California has its own labor law, and federal law only takes precedence when it demands greater employee benefits and job protection than the state law. In other words, your average geek could be billing big time for pulling all-nighters.

Next page | Labor lawyers lick their chops