having on call responsibilities and being available 24/7 are significantly different. On call is a structured rotation that is usually explicitly part of a job description.
Yes this is true. And it's a good thing to remember to ask about when applying for jobs (and seems like an entirely reasonable thing to want to know before you sign up)
It was helpful when I had a more structured on-call rotation and once we switched to 3 day shifts I was able to trade off shifts so I almost never was on-call Sunday morning.
Unfortunately I was also team lead on a temperamental system for a while which had many production issues, so despite the on-call rotation, things often escalated. It was not a fun year.
That said it only happened a few times that year, though the constant threat of it wears on you after a while, and it's precisely that issue which lies at the spirit of the Sabbath. It's not really a day off if you're worried about the pager going off all the time and constantly checking slack, even if nothing is happening.
Unpaid work is unpaid work (wage theft), full stop. You're not paid for 40 hours and then "heh, you're on call outside of 9-5 for the next week, but that's what you're paid for". Call it what it is: wage theft.
That's not how many employment opportunities work. Allowances, expenses--hell, even salaried compensation are all ways in which non-40hr-work-week positions are handled. Whether compensation/interaction in these circumstances happens ethically versus exploitatively depends on many things, but not "whether or not someone works more than 40 hours a week for a non-hourly-wage position".
not disagreeing with you but, in the USA the default is you're owed overtime if you work more than 40hrs. The law list exceptions to that. "Salaried" is not a valid exception. The exceptions are explicit jobs and have various requirements. Unfortunately IIRC computer professional is one of the exemptions. Should maybe ban together to remove that exemption.
Also apparently being paid > $100k a year is an exception
Lots of companies have mis-understood this law, thought just claiming "salaried" was enough and were later found in violation.
I'm not sure how I feel about the $100k exemption. One the one hand I hate it. On the other hand I'm being paid $100k+. Seems like a trade off. Like would I rather have $99k + overtime pay or $150k. The advantage to $99 + overtime might be the company manages better since they don't want to pay overtime. On the other hand they could just budget $150k internally and still demand the overtime and maybe end up only spending $130k total or something.
Of course as a programmer I'm already exempt apparently which feels kind of BS, same with artists. But I should probably research any counter arguments.
Indeed, I’m pointing out the labor law deficiency that needs remediation. Your employer should never be able to have unconstrained demands on your time for a fixed wage.
I'm not sure I understand. You're saying that it's not possible for someone of sound mind to decide to trade a technically-unconstrained probability distribution of demands on their time (with exit rights) for a fixed wage, no matter how high? And that two parties should be prohibited by law from making this exchange?
I'm not making a general-purpose argument against regulating nominally consensual labor agreements, but this specific example is an awfully weird context to decide that people need to be protected from themselves. I've had jobs where the exact hours of oncall rotations weren't explicitly spelled out in the contract, and I made the decision that the oncall rotation was worth the fixed pay. Trading fixed amounts of money for probability distributions is all over the economy (this is what insurance is), and you're the first person I've ever heard suggest that it should be prohibited.
Would you mind elaborating on why you think this is so egregious that people need to be protecting from themselves so they don't engage in it?
We’re not talking about unique agreements. We’re talking about below or at market rate compensated roles where you’re expected to be available after hours, on top of a 40 hour work week. No, I don’t think that should be allowed unless you’re compensated specially for the time you’re on call, as well as when you need to actively engage while on call (removing exempt employee status for technology professionals). This is no different than roles like nursing, or IT in developed countries with robust labor regulations.
People don’t need to be protected from themselves. They need to be protected from employers, who have more power than labor (through at will employment and a lack of collective bargaining). Simply because some are willing to work for free does not mean that technology professionals as a whole should accept such a poor arrangement, because it’s been normalized as such by employees who accept it.
European countries are moving in this direction (prohibiting email access outside of business hours), and I hope to see more progress on this front in the US over time.
The attitude that salaried employees are expected to be available at all hours is such a US labour market thing.
So much so that a (US headquartered) multinational I worked for gave up trying to get their EU employees to do weekend on call, as the team didn't want to get treated that way.
salaried software engineers (in california at least) are exempt employees and thus don't have to be paid overtime.
I'm pretty sure if you are not an exempt salaried employee or you are hourly then you do in fact have to be paid for the time on call that you are actually working and if you are not that is in fact illegal and wage theft.
Anecdotally I have a friend who works in IT that is on call and does get paid for all the time on call that he is working.
as another response said on call can or can not be exploitative depending on how it's setup but that is a separate issue from whether it's wage theft.
> Anecdotally I have a friend who works in IT that is on call and does get paid for all the time on call that he is working.
That's actually very common, at least around here outside of the startup scene. There's usually a fixed amount for just being on call, plus an hourly rate (often higher than regular rate) for actually having to do anything.
Last time I managed a team of on-call staff, they all got paid for 2hrs at their regular rate for each weekday and 4hrs for each weekend day they were on call (whether they got called or not), plus time and a half for every hour they worked (rounded up to a minimum of 1hr per incident, so three 5 minute "quick fixes" counted at 3hrs at time and a half, which on a weekend meant 7hrs additional pay). We tried to make sure everyone by default got a rotation of a week of weekdays, a single two day weekend, then a whole week of just office hours. They were free to negotiate swaps amongst themselves as needed (it there was not required payroll adjustment), and to request schedule adjustments as needed (mostly for when the change would need payroll to be informed). We ended up averaging fewer than 10% of on-call shifts getting paged. Everybody was happy enough with that arrangement - it was about as good as any on-call arrangement I've ever been part of.
I've done that for production support on an ecommerce site we developed before fully handing off to the client. Spreading the on call work as much as possible among the dev team I think is ideal, because it adds a shared incentive to employ good practices during the day to reduce incidents after hours.
Taking the shifts was optional and had a similar pay structure.
