So this is a post I have made a few times before but this seems like a place where it could be helpful. In the US there is a mistaken belief among many people that if you are in a salaried position as opposed to an hourly one, you are not entitled to overtime pay. This is NOT accurate. Whether or not you are entitled to overtime is based almost entirely on the nature of your job duties.

Jobs are either exempt or non-exempt from overtime pay based on certain criteria that are generally the same throughout the country, though there may be some small variations from state to state. Exempt positions do not qualify for overtime. If you are in a salaried position that is non-exempt, your employer is required to pay prorated overtime based on your salary for the hours you worked beyond 40 in a week. This means if you are salaried and work 50 hours in a week in a non-exempt job, your employer is required to pay you a MINIMUM of 37.5% additional weekly pay, 25% for the extra 10 hours and 12.5% for the federally mandated time-and-a-half overtime rate. This page has a general explanation of what types of positions are exempt vs non-exempt, however be sure to contact your state's Dept of Labor before making any decisions based on this.

IT IS ILLEGAL TO NOT PAY THIS OVERTIME, EVEN IF YOU AGREED TO NOT RECEIVE IT! Even if you signed an agreement that you don't get paid overtime, you are still entitled to it, as that agreement is illegal for employers to ask for and therefore null and void. If you employer has not been paying you overtime for a non-exempt job, you are usually entitled to all the back overtime pay you have not received AND significant additional penalty money.

If you believe you are being denied overtime you are owed, BE SURE TO KEEP TRACK OF YOUR WORK HOURS.

Wage theft is the most common form of theft in the US, and this is one of the way it happens. Protect yourself from wage theft by familiarizing yourself with these rules.

I am happy to answer any questions I can in the comments, however I am not a lawyer, my knowledge of this comes from personal experience with dealing with unpaid overtime.

Lenin first confronts the so-called economist trend in Russian social democracy that followed the line of Eduard Bernstein. He explains that Bernstein's positions were opportunist, a point expressed by the French socialist Alexandre Millerand as in taking a post in a bourgeois government. Against the economists' demand for freedom of criticism, Lenin advances the position that the orthodox Marxists had the same right to criticize in return. He stresses that in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, revolutionary social democrats would need to pay particular attention to theoretical questions, recalling Engels' position that there were three forms of social democratic struggle, namely political, economic and theoretical.

Lenin hypothesizes that workers will not spontaneously become Marxists merely by fighting battles over wages with their employers. Instead, Marxists need to form a political party to publicize Marxist ideas and persuade workers to join. He argues that understanding politics requires understanding all of society, not just workers and their economic struggles with their employers.

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without; that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.

Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin writes that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness"; that is, combining into trade unions and so on. However, socialist theory in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, was the product of the "educated representatives of the propertied classes", the intellectuals or "revolutionary socialist intellectuals". Lenin states that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, the very founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

I'm currently in the middle of negotiating a wage increase of 12.5%. I'm somewhat of a rare commodity in my field as I have zero criminal record, a clean driving record, presentable and I communicate with customers well.
For those wondering the field is roofing. Late last year I was "promoted" to a new position but I'm still waiting for that to materialize as the company is having trouble finding employees similar to me. In the mean time I'm asking for a raise to help with rising housing costs in our city.

I have a meeting scheduled Monday and I'm not very good with negotiating wages and often sell myself short. Any help approaching the situation would be greatly appreciated.

I'm researching it, but I also wanted to hear from others who have started a union at their workplace. I just started a new gig where there is no union and am considering starting one in the hopes of changing some red flags I've seen and advocating for better work conditions.

Thanks in advance! Any advice helps!

Pretty much as the title says. I have an interview this week and I really want to impress. What are useful and informative questions to ask the interviewer?

this is why the “movement” is never going to work. It may not be obvious to some, but it’s extremely anti-intellectual.

Who understands the banking system best? Bankers, but the common sentiment is that “we need to kick them out.”

Who are the most effective communicators? Management consultants, so we need to kick them out too.

Economists tend to lean right? So they must be wrong, and we better find some people on the fringes that we agree with a-priori.

The fact of the matter is that a movement needs intelligent, hard-working, charismatic leaders. Such people don’t walk dogs. They aren’t bank tellers. Those kind of people are at McKinsey. They’re at Goldman Sachs. They’re at Cravath.

They don’t go to Northern West Virginia community college. They go to Princeton undergrad. They go to HBS. They go to Yale law.

That’s just the reality of the matter. Martin Luther King Junior had a phd from Boston University, you know.

I have a new team lead who consistently praises and defends three other team members, that literally do the bare minimum, take forever to complete work and just clearly, don’t do their jobs at all. I often have to pick up their slack and she could care less if I say I don’t have the bandwidth. Clients consistently complain about them, yet she still fought for them all to get a raise. All that seems to matter to my TL is the needs of the other three. Im now looking for a new job, but how can I respectfully (to avoid burning bridges) tell her I’m not taking on their work anymore? Why the hell is she catering to them so heavily, when the other members of the team are so obviously carrying their asses? I’m so fed up at this point, I’ve decided to start doing the bare minimum too.

Promoting work reform is inherently a leftist movement. Not just a little left, either.

It includes acknowledging the intricacies of gender, race, and sexuality.

If you are going to spit in the face of different genders and races for sake of avoiding an inconvenient conversation, this isn’t the space.

It is not a place to gate keep what people are fighting for, both individually and on a large scale.

If you’re going to say “let’s not talk about X” then you’re in the wrong space and you’re not welcome.

Right aligning people can be pro work reform- but you have to acknowledge that the conversations aren’t going to cater to right ideologies that circulate such as not seeing color and ignoring the issues that women and POC face in the workplace because of who they are.

If you want work reform, you support it for everyone, not just you.

Edit: y’all will really cut off your own nose in spite of your face to avoid having to even think about race and gender. You want to focus on class wars but not acknowledge how these three are intertwined.

You can’t say you’re “for the worker” when you ignore the unique issues of your fellow black worker or woman worker.

Yeah, title. I see a lot of people talking shit about /r/antiwork, which I think they absolutely deserve. But telling people to leave there just reinforces the conspiracy theory that /r/WorkReform is some kind of conservative shill sub. Encourage people to join here, dont tell them to leave there.
Workers unite, dont infight. The cause is more important then sticking it to some people, regardless of how much they deserve it.

Long story short, 2020 and 2021 were the hardest years I've had - and not even because of COVID.

I used to be a claims adjuster for a big insurance company... I'm not going to out them, but I will say their "members" are Military and military families.

I started before COVID, literally right before. We got moved to work from home during training. I tried super hard to be an excellent employee - I've never received a write up in any company in the entirety of my 10 years in the work force.

Things were rough but I was gettin by, the work load was terrible and stressful and people from my training class were dropping like flies out of the company, but I still showed up and tried my hardest. However - September 2020 my dad dies of complications of HIV, December 2020 my grandma dies of lung cancer on my birthday. February 2021, my partner goes to jail for domestic violence.

I communicated with my boss that I think it'd be best for me to take some time off, and she agreed since I was super open and honest for MONTHS about my situation.

I was put on a leave of absence March through June. In that time I went to doctors appointments (at the job site because we had a clinician there), I went through Domestic Violence therapy, I went through grief counseling, I was put on medications for anxiety and depression. I really put in the work to get better to be able to come back and "serve our members".

I came back in June, worked a week before being placed on a "performance improvement plan", which I fought and refused to sign, and that ultimately turned into me quitting on the spot the next day.

I have anxiety about working for another corporation again until we get some reform in place. I've been doing gig work until I feel like bosses will start treating employees as humans instead of just productivity charts.

What can I do in my community to make this happen? How can I raise awareness to this idea that we all deserve better?

i work part-time in a medium-sized retail business that has a few specialty shops in the region. owners have been struggling to staff the store and have increased their beginning hourly wage for new hires. i joined the team 2 years ago as a general salesperson -- selling, stocking shelves and manning the cash register. i got a 4.5% raise after a few weeks. about a year ago, i was given some responsibilities in a couple of departments and an 8% pay raise.

since i've started, the entire team has changed over a couple times. my store now has a different manager (internal promotion, has been with the company for years), but i have the most seniority for that particular shop. i just found out that one of the newer hires, who started maybe 5 or 6 months ago, is making a bit more than me. i'm expanding my hours and i will be working at another location in addition to the first.

how can i leverage my knowledge of my coworker's hourly to get a better raise without throwing her under the bus?

Recent behaviour regarding the interview disbanded a subreddit with over 1.6 million followers in a day. And rightly so.

Traditional organisations function through hierarchy, mandate and accountability. But how does this work in informal networks, such as reddit?

If you ask me, this subreddit should write down (very concrete) what working should be like and apply the same principles to the governance of this subreddit.

Going from A to B on the B way.

Once upon a time, believe it or not, it was commonplace for businesses to balance the interest of the customer, the shareholder, and the worker. That was before the fire nation Milton Friedman attacked. For those who don't know, Friedman is a famous economist whose work, for better and worse, has been extremely influential and important to understanding not just the economy, but how we interface with it. Milton is also the economist who wrote the Friedman Doctrine in 1970.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

The tl;dr is that the Friedman Doctrine is that doctrine which says that a corporation has no other obligation than to look out for it's shareholders. Not just that, but that if a corporate executive does anything other than what is in the interest of the shareholders, that it is a form of tyranny. Now, you can argue that raising wages might be good for the shareholders, but that requires your shareholders to have long term vision. Instead, what we've gotten out of it is two things: short sighted slash-and-burn capitalism and an ever thickening Cronyism. Slash and burn capitalism because we need to sacrifice everything at the altar of this very day's shareholder. Cronyism because Galaxy brains know that there's nothing better for shareholders than getting the government and the taxpayer to help your profits. Thanks, Milton.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Lately there's been lots of groups coming out as allies to support work reform, and that's great, but you got to realize what your party has been doing to kill worker rights/benefits.

I think we should just focus on 1 single issue, that's minimum wage.

Conservatives generally believe raising min wage is against free market, increase inflation, destroy the economy Edit but it doesn't happen in other countries. But the free market just targets people who are willing to get paid the least amount of money.

Let's look at some of the benefits of raising minimum wage, especially for conservatives:

• people will have more money and buy more things
  • you'll make more money as a business owner
• people will save more, they'll be able to afford better housing
  • you'll make more money selling your property
  • you'll make more money renting out your investment property

That's it, if you're on the right, then the right thing to do is raise minimum wage.

If you run a business, if you gotta pay your employee from 30k to 50k (example numbers), imagine all the 1000s of people getting paid extra coming into your store to buy more things from you.

update: someone posted this great image of min wage in other countries and the price of a big mac is pretty consistent even with higher wages.

I've spent the past few years job hopping after reaching burnout. A handful of jobs that I've had were actually objectively terrible. But others I really think were objectively not that bad. I think the source of my burnout has almost always been the 40 hour workweek and I really don't know what to do about it.

I have a few physical/mental health problems that makes work really difficult for me to do to begin with. Chronic fatigue syndrome is probably the biggest contributor, but ADHD, anxiety disorder, IBS, and POTS don't help for sure. I would guess that if I were unmarried and able to put in the effort, that I would qualify for disability payments just because of how badly I struggle. It's not a path I've tried to go down before though because a) I understand how difficult it is to get approved, and think that with my spouse's income that I'm not poor enough to be approved anyway and b) I genuinely do want to work.

I'm reaching that age where I really do need my own benefits since I'm sure that non-employer health care would put me straight into poverty given all the medical care and medications I need. So at this point, gig work and part time work would create problems for me, beyond just not making as much money overall.

It's frustrating and I feel so stuck. Work is so taxing on me mentally and physically that I spend my evenings after work just trying to recover, a full weekend day recovering, and my other weekend day just trying to catch up on other obligations that I neglected during the week. It's such an unbalanced way of living it leaves me with basically no time to pursue any other interests and hobbies.

I like my job. I want to work. I really think that even just cutting down my workweek to 32 hours a week (4 days) would be life-changing. The position I'm in right now is unionized and I'm a state employee, so I really don't see negotiating this change being a possibility for me.

I just want a middle ground. Some recognition that even though I'm disabled, I still want to work and am trying my best. If disability could provide me with insurance even, so I could safely work at a part-time job, that would probably be fine. Meanwhile, I'm just feeling so defeated in knowing that even though this is a "good job", I'm still steadily heading toward another burnout/mental health crisis.

Is there anyone else out there in the same position? Or anyone that has any resources they know of that may help?

I’m not going to say my political ideology. It’s not a mystery but it doesn’t matter here.

I came to say that our politics, cable news media, and the most powerful individuals in our society (billionaires), all have a vested interest in us viewing each other as an existential threat. I implore every individual here to keep the focus on workers’ rights. It does not matter if someone is pro life, or if someone thinks all guns should be collected and melted down. We’re not here to talk about those issues or pretty much any issue besides workers’ rights. It’s time we all recognized that the biggest threat to our freedom as individuals of the working class is the power the billionaires and corporate employers hold over us. That needs to be the target of our hostility. That needs to be the focus of our outrage. It doesn’t matter if you double mask outdoors on a hot summer day, or if you think vaccines cause autism. None of that matters if we can’t feed our families and have a hopeful future for them.

Focus on what matters. Solidarity and workers’ rights. Stay safe everyone.

Dear mods,

Don't make the same mistake as the other lazy idiot... I don't want to see this subreddit going into the same direction and we need these ideas online and being pushed as much as possible!

Thank you, Your sincere and avid reader boss of a few.

I hope there is a swift and immediate transition out of this sub. Regardless of work reform intentions or your views on it we have to take it seriously.

Going to the front of reddit and uttering words like work reform, people who don't know WILL take it at face value and dismiss it.

The subs name is absolutely vague, its something that does give ammo to the people who would see this awakening and movement as another grey, co-opted project. That's very important if we want to see moderate to no change come from our society and govt.

All I want is a moderate and inoffensive light to the public that encapsulates the liberal-tinted reality of the world we live in when it comes to work. That way, when we talk outside of the sub, its laughed at by the people in power when we beg them to give us the sacraps. I think a sub name like right to work would help us all, then we can let them know we're absolutely no threat to the system.

Seriously, one bad interview and you all throw in the towel? I won't lie, its fucking pathetic. All of you turning your backs on the anarchists and socialists who pushed the anti-work project from the start and are acting high and mighty because you regurgitate Fox News talking points about Occupy and Defund the Police? My favorite part of the civil rights movement was when they named it the Okay Just Water Fountains movement, or the militant labor movement of the early 20th century when instead of breaking their bosses shit and getting into gunfights with Pinkertons they gave up on the whole thing when the local paper called them commies.

"They say in Harlan County, There are no neutrals there, you'll either be a Union Man or a thug for J. H. Blair."

Quit letting the right's opinion of you dominate what you believe. Spoiler alert, trying to appease Jesse Watters will only make you look like a bigger fool.

Soo I work in a small company in a conservative area of Washington State. We used to have about 10 employees here and despite my boss's terrible marketing strategies we've been moving and growing after about 5 years of me working there. I definitely recognize that I have been a major part of the company's success and ability to hire on more employees.

Boss bought a new house in Bumfuck, Idaho and says that he likes the area but we all know that he is really moving because he's terrified the government is going to hold him down and vaccinate him. I digress. ANYway...he is selling the company assets to a competitor in the industry and retiring. Good riddance.

I have been ready to ask for another raise since I got bumped up (+$3.00) from minimum wage a year ago. I'm aware that inflation keeps rising and I need a raise to keep up with it. I'm also aware that the company has lost employees over the years so now we're down to just 2 full-time employees that work under him. That means that I now do the work of 2-3 people on a daily basis.

I have been hounding him to settle the deal with the new owner so that I could then have a follow-up meeting and give an ultimatum: You give me a major raise or risk this company collapsing without me to keep it afloat. The company name is going to change with a new owner. I am under no obligation to work for this new company, and they think I am on board even though I have not actually consented or signed any papers.

Since the company I really work for is moving to another state and the new guy wants to hire me on, can I just say no to his offer and collect unemployment?

We have a meeting in 5 days. Does Reddit have any guidance or advice for me before I go into this?

There's been a lot of posts questioning the mods here over what work they do and who they are.

And it's a fair sentiment when you get burned by bad unrepresentative leadership (like at r/antiwork) when you're a trucker driver working 80 hours and can't take a toilet brake, or when you're a teacher and nurse working trash wages and being forced to work as essential workers.'

As a union worker though I just want to remind everyone that white collar and blue collar jobs are BOTH still working jobs. Unions run are meant to represent all workers against the power of corporations, their management, and shills for the rich. It doesnt matter if it's a welder or a bank worker, senior developer or lineman, you are ALL workers.

Together we stand against to improve the our situation and oppose this system that oppresses us.

Not sure if this is allowed. My coworker, as well as the rest of the employees, were at work last week and in the middle of the day someone came and sawed off the catalytic converter from his truck and took off. This was in the company parking lot and during work hours. They claimed the cameras didn’t pick anything up and are also refusing to help the guy pay for the damages to his vehicle. He asked if he could check on his vehicle every half hour so it wouldn’t happen again but they told him he couldn’t do that. Is it legal for a company to act this way? Is it their responsibility since it’s on company property? He’s not sure how to go about it so I came to Reddit for some professional opinions.

TLDR: Boss bad. Coworker Sad.

Think about it this way: why would a company bankroll a department that doesn't have 100% of it's best interests in mind?

Unions are not bankrolled by companies for this exact reason.

So next time you have a complaint, particularly with management, consider whether or not you'd be better off going to your union or labor board.

I unfortunately am not aware of alternatives to unions or labor boards for those who don't have access to either.

So I'm noticing that the main Mod of this sub is under fire for their personal life. I think this is ridiculous!

This sub or whatever sub we belong to is for us.

Mods are here just to do that, moderate. They are not our leaders.

As long as we get fair moderation there should be no issues IMO. If there are, I guess we will go somewhere else.

We are energy! We cannot be destroyed! The movement will continue!