Wait though is that true? Wasn't it an Obama appointee actually. Not that their guy wouldn't have wanted it all the same.
In other news in once again in this Belgian Beer Cafe Hotel bar at happy hour. Work is becoming super stressful plus the horrible news back home. Still I think I need to limit this to once a week at most lest I start punning intolerably.
Wait though is that true? Wasn't it an Obama appointee actually. Not that their guy wouldn't have wanted it all the same.
In other news in once again in this Belgian Beer Cafe Hotel bar at happy hour. Work is becoming super stressful plus the horrible news back home. Still I think I need to limit this to once a week at most lest I start punning intolerably.
Since the election, 1 has become my attitude towards all the people who voted away their own health care. "OK, go die of a preventable cause, since that's what you seem to want so badly".
I'm enough of a squishy liberal to feel that this reflects poorly on me.
5 Also not terribly helpful politics for building the kind of coalition we need to get out of this mess but I feels you boy do I feels you.
We actually got a bunch of emails about the rule change and then the court ruling. I didn't read them. I just read the one about the snow days because I wanted to confirm I still get paid if I stay home when my son is out of school for a snow day.
But the comically low salary at which you lose overtime pay because you're "professional" is completely undermining the concept of a forty hour work week. There should probably be a general strike at some point.
There should probably be a general strike at some point.
How does the week of January 23 work for you?
On the bright side, I think my brother made good money suing for unpaid overtime on behalf of people wrongly classified as "managers". There will probably be even more clients in the next four years.
8,9: I've been wanting a general strike among scientists and researchers for a while, but - for my field at least - I'm pretty sure the reaction would be, "Wait, this whole time we've actually been paying you for this crap??"
It's not a general strike if just scientist and researchers do it.
Even if there were a strike people would still be all, "I have to go in to pass the cells or feed the mice" or whatever.
We had some discussions about this at work because we had to adjust some people to meet the rule. I don't know if we're still going through with those changes- probably, we're squishy like that.
3: Yes, it was an Obama appointed judge who preliminarily enjoined the rule change, but the Trump administration will ensure that it stays dead (though really there wasn't much reason to expect it to be ressurected by the Fifth Circuit or the SCt).
Depending on how broad the email was, though, good chance a lot of people receiving it are misclassified as overtime exempt even under the current rule, though. There's more to it than whether you make $23k a year, your duties also have to qualify you, and employers fudge that all the time. That was part of the motivation, I imagine, for doubling the salary threshold in the new rule--a lot harder to get away with fudging that.
I have to go in to pass the cells
IYKWIMAITYD.
13 What if the senior staff officers in the army go on strike?
A general strike forged in advance within the fetters of legality is like a war demonstration with cannons dumped into a river within the very sight of the enemy.
How the fuck do you live anywhere in $23k a year without falling deeper and deeper into debt?
Probably two incomes. Also, really cheap housing.
Also, falling deeper into debt is pretty common.
19: I don't know. You got killed for it and, on the other hand, Ebert lived long enough to write really scathing reviews of Rob Schneider movies.
You're born, you go into debt, you fall deeper into debt and then you die.
Scientists - that is, proper scientists, with white coats and the Primal Forces of the Universe at their command - should know that there is nothing they can achieve by not working that is half as terrifying to policymakers as the things they can achieve by working, should they so wish, and should shape their strategies of protest accordingly.
I've got some robots that can lead the revolt except they're bolted to the floor. But if you come within reach better watch out!
On topic: We just got an email saying that they will honor the raises they had given people before the ruling.
I should mention that about this time last year I actually did have the SecDef within reach of the robots. They were well behaved though.
11: The whole management classification is steaming bullshit. There should be no fucking exemptions. 40 regular hours a week with overtime at 150% for the first ten hours and 200% for anything over that, and overtime should be limited to less than 500 hours a year. It should apply to everybody, from the president down to the lowliest high schooler working fast food for pot money.
Wage theft affects everyone, and the management classification is just another way of stealing labor. In conclusion, fuck everything.
I don't agree with 30. I'm responsible for a given set of tasks, not hours. This really does provide me with a great deal of flexibility and control over my life. It's just not a concept that is applicable to somebody making $455 per week.
There's no reason you can't have flexibility and control on an hourly system. I work hourly and have enormous freedom to choose when those hours are. The problem with task-based employment is that The Man will tend to load you up with tasks until you are doing 60-80 hours. There are some places that won't do that, but the Walmarts and Amazons of the world certainly will.
If they were paying me hourly and flexibly, they'd want me to track everything so it could be assigned to a specific grant. That way lies madness and software with a clock marked out in six-minute increments. Plus, the legal mandate would limit your flexibility to seven day periods.
I actually will work 60-80 hours a week during December. But 20-40 of that will be for outside contract work. I would rather not work that much in the run up to Christmas, but I'm too nervous about what will happen to the economy come January to turn down the money.
I'm living your nightmare Moby! Tracking time to assign to different grants, the whole nine yards. Turns out it's not hard as long as you aren't trying to be absolutely precise. I track time in half hour increments and even then chances are I'm estimating a bit when it comes to filling out time sheets. Perhaps your administrators are more dickish about accuracy than mine.
I have no idea. I never had to deal with them before.
I've done the timesheet thing (not in academia) and it was ok as long as you didn't let it accumulate. I was seemingly alone in feeling that though, so.
When I first started at my current place we had to do that, and eventually I got pissed off and started including a line item for how much I was spending per week filling out the time sheet. Soon after they dropped the requirement.
Which grant do you bill for time spent reading unfogged?
38 That's great.
39 Was my first thought.
They were giving raises just to comply with the overtime rules? Or just "raise" defined as "this group is now eligible for overtime as well as their existing salary"?
How the fuck do you live anywhere in $23k a year without falling deeper and deeper into debt?
And $23K isn't even officially poor for a family of three. (It's $20K.)
Subsidies help -- food stamps, CHIP (Medicaid for kids), free school lunch, Section 8 -- but it's not near enough.
41: The raises are designed to circumvent the rules -- to allow people to still be considered exempt.
Still I think I need to limit this to once a week at most lest I start punning intolerably.
Do everything you need to do to prevent punning.
42- I live on substantially less than that, and mostly feel satisfied. It helps if you never want to go anywhere or do anything.
43: Implying that they're doing so much overtime it's cheaper to raise a bunch of people's salaries all the way to $47K (likely a big increase, considering location) than to start paying out? Or do they put a tremendous amount of intangible value on the power to compel overtime at will? (Plus maybe the administrative convenience of no timesheets, I guess.)
47: At least here, the most common change was raising someone's salary to $47k, but they weren't making $23k before. At least I don't think they were. It's mostly people who were making over $40k anyway.
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A journal we're about to submit a paper to lets you request that certain potential reviewers be excluded, and requires that you give a reason.
What's a diplomatic way of saying "This person is an arrogant asshole"?
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"This person has a competing research agenda which may impede their judgement of our work in the same area."
I successfully used something very close to the formulation in 50, last year.
"Always very offended and standoffish when I want to smell her hair."
Heebie, just so I understand the full despicableness of what just transpired, I want to clarify:
"We were gonna get -forced- to give you all raises, but now, there's a court injunction, so we might not have to; stay tuned, but especially, bwahahahahahah!!!! MONEY!!! MONEY!!!!! Just in time for those gold-plated Christmas toilets!"
Is that accurate? If so, it isn't just .... these workers voted away their own pay raises, but now the administrators are gonna keep that sweet, sweet money, that they -could- have given to these workers, but hey .... who treats workers decently just because it's the decent thing to do?
Chumps! Amirite?!?
5: Since the election, 1 has become my attitude towards all the people who voted away their own health care. "OK, go die of a preventable cause, since that's what you seem to want so badly".
I'm enough of a squishy liberal to feel that this reflects poorly on me.
My own response is more like, "Fine, you yourself can be on your own, since that's what you seem to want so badly, but fuck you for throwing the rest of us under the bus as well."
I say this having just completed my Obamacare renewal for next year, observing that the full cost of my chosen individual plan (Silver plan, $1500 deductible) is $564/month.
Yeah, I've done the timesheet thing and I hated it, even when it got me some extra overtime pay back in the day (I was in one of those intermediate classifications where I could be either exempt or non-exempt in a given week depending on whether the majority of my duties for the week were classified as exempt or non-exempt. The catch was that the non-exempt stuff got you overtime, but it was the exempt stuff that could get you promoted.)
And what I think togolosh is missing, but Moby gets, is that it makes a hell of a lot of difference whether the decision to work specific hours is my choice or my manager's choice. If I was working in one of those places where the manager said "everyone here will be expected to work Saturdays and nights from now till Christmas so we can get the product out," I'd hate that. But engage me on an aggressive goal that I decide needs me to work some of those same periods, and I'm fine with it - as long as the decision is my choice, not someone else's.
The other thing is that my goals for the job and my employer's goals are generally aligned, but not perfectly. If I had to fit everything into a strict 40 hour week, I know which of those two would get sacrificed. One example: when I was working on a paper for an external workshop, and I thought it needed extra time for rewrite. My employer wanted me focused on getting code out, and doing the minimum possible on the paper to get it published. They would have been perfectly happy to have me sign my name to a press release from our VP of marketing and calling it a paper, if I could still get it published. I took the attitude that if it was my name going on the paper and my face presenting it, I damn well was going to make sure it was academically respectable and something I could be proud of putting on my resume and presenting at the workshop. It took a lot more than 40-hour weeks to resolve that conflict, but I'm damn proud of the resulting paper. And my employer was pretty happy with the result also, even if I had to fight for the time to do it right.
That's 42x what I'm paying here. Dear christ but you people have fucked up.
57.3 I'm facing a lot of that here. Including having to rewrite a ton of stuff that was done before I came on board but since it will go out soon it will reflect on me since it's my area of responsibility here. And almost all of the stuff I am rewriting was plagiarized (wikipedia and dealer's catalogs) and I don't have all the sources I need to do proper rewrites. And on time. Hence the drinking at hotel bars at night.
And I probably could have just passed on all of it and said, no it's all good and it would have been fine with my employer but fuck no way was I going to let it go out like that.
Well, yes. Not just on the total spending (17% of GDP) but politically as well. The cost of health care is hidden for many people (the elderly, those with higher paying jobs), so when people talk about the high Obamacare bills, very few people who have not looked into the matter deeply, have any basis for comparison.
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I have a high school kid in one of my classes. He's very exuberant and cheerful, but also a country kid who is very conservative in a way that comes across as very sheltered.
Somehow he has become bffs with a black kid in the class - they sit next to each other, they compete on the material, they constantly make jokes, etc.
Today the country kid announced, as they were forming small groups, that he was nicknaming the black kid "Jamaal". (UGH, I know, this is the kind of thing that marks him as too young for college. Racist college kids are not so brassy.)
BUT OMG, how great to be able to say casually, from across the room, "Oh, my husband's name is Jamaal."
The country kid said, "I mean, I just think it's a good name to call him."
I said, "That's what my husband's mother thought, too."
One of the older black students was practically dissolved into giggles from the interaction.
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I thought it was more of his dad's idea.
57.2: The world is full of "voluntary" situations where the alternatives have been engineered to be so bad that there is no realistic choice. The MBAstards know this and will do everything in their power to squeeze as much as possible out of each worker. I've had it made clear to me that I was to "voluntarily" work 60-80 hour weeks (while writing down 40 hours on my time sheet) or lose my job and be blacklisted, so arguments about choice ring particularly hollow to me.
I get that there are problems with a strict policy of paying for labor done, but there are much worse ones in the actually existing system, where overwork is standard in some industries to a degree that people lose half their labor to wage theft. I think the relatively minor inconveniences of counting hours are well worth fixing those problems, especially since the primary beneficiaries are the relatively less economically empowered and the people being inconvenienced are for the most part UMC.
I don't see how being made to write down 40 hours on a time sheet is fixed by the change you are proposing.
I hear violins!
Must have something to do with the burden of multi-client timekeeping.
Or maybe violence.
To rip off Hemlock Stones.
I have to record how I spend all my time at work. One of the entries is for the time I spend entering my time.
I could print out all my daily time entries and publish them as a novel. It wouldn't be a good novel, but it would certainly be fiction.
Just replace "Shepardizing" with "stroking" and you'll have a romance.
61: so when people talk about the high Obamacare bills, very few people who have not looked into the matter deeply, have any basis for comparison.
For what it's worth, the "high" Obamacare bills for individual insurance (non-employer) are lower than what they were pre-Obamacare.
But yes, I'd like to see comparisons to the premium for employer-based insurance plans.
54 and OP: At our university too. Post-docs were explicitly included as professionals and god knows, there is pressure to work more than 40 (50? 60?) hours per week. Back to just being a poorly paid professional.
Now that it is hopefully no longer quite the open wound, I want to note my semi-prophetry. (Undermined a couple of comments later.)
If we're going to count post-docs as people, then I need to start over.
"5: Since the election, 1 has become my attitude towards all the people who voted away their own health care. "OK, go die of a preventable cause, since that's what you seem to want so badly"."
and somewhere, there is a 'thoughful' conservative who is prepared to advanced the 'bold' thesis that it was liberals with this kind of attitude that caused the Trump victory, advancing your post as a illustration of the alleged liberal attitude.
72: We have a two person office in Oregon where one of us has a pre-existing condition. We had a small group plan pre-ACA so both of us could get coverage. When Obamacare started we went to individual plans because it gave us more flexibility, was less expensive, and we just bumped our salaries to cover the premiums. I have always been very healthy with minimal medical expenses so I have had a Bronze HSA compatible policy each year. The first year the premium was around $330 a month but has grown to $840 a month for 2017 (58 year old man). Due to the large premium increase and the uncertainty about the future of the ACA, we decided to return to a small group plan for 2017 and the premium for each of us for coverage equivalent to the Bronze HSA policy will be $543 a month. Initially the individual plan premium was less than the group plan but now the group plan is significantly cheaper.
77: After looking through my records, the first year individual premium was $289 a month, second year $335 a month, 2016 was $448 a month, and 2017 would have been $840 a month. Our group premium prior to going to the individual plan was about $600 a month but the coverage is not really comparable (some things better, some worse).