Much of the world needs to work two jobs. Chris Williams writes that managers should be careful in how they react to an employee working multiple jobs.
Not really. If they’re fulfilling their contractual obligations to their employer(s), then who the hell cares?
It’s long past time that we stop treating employees like they’re chattel of the company that they work for. You hire someone to do a job, which they either do to your satisfaction or not, but you don’t own them and you shouldn’t get to control the parameters of their life.
They aren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations if they aren’t allowed to have a second job and are doing it anyway, so this notion is nonsense to begin with. If you get paid hourly you can’t be working for someone else while getting paid by the first company for the same time. For salaried, typically there are expectations of how long you’ll be working or even your availability.
The company I work for has more than three decades of experience with WFH, and it’s almost always clear when someone is trying to double dip. It’s impossible to keep it hidden for long. Eventually you will have conflicting schedules, and excuses start piling up. Even if the work is good, very few jobs are done in a vacuum where you never need to talk to anyone or work things through. Most situations like that are handled by subcontractors who have all the freedoms you’re talking about. In fact the only situation I can even think of that would fit the mold of how work is being framed here is through contractors.
It has nothing to do with double dipping or the way the article describes it which isn’t really what the word means. Having two jobs you work during different hours is usually fine. Working them during the same hours is the issue.
You can assert that it’s a “problem” all you want, it doesn’t make it true. Salaried exempt has a definition which is compatible, in abstract, with working two jobs in the same working day or week span. It has to do with being able to fill the key responsibilities of your job description on a given day or week. If you fulfill those, the rest of the time is yours to do whatever you want with. The expectation is that on the other hand you will work overtime if needed to complete those key aspects without additional pay. That’s the definition in a nutshell. You adding stipulations about time and “double dipping”, et cetera is fabrication. That’s just what companies eventually pushed into being normalized as unwritten law in an ever-present desire to squeeze every single imaginary accounting cent they can out of their most expensive assets. It’s high time people pushed back on this bullshit. Most people in office jobs can do their jobs effectively in well under 40 hours. One of the reasons there’s so much bureacracy and time wasting in corporate environments is so people can fill up that arbitrary amount of time without 😱 looking like they’re doing their jobs in less than 40 hours. Businesses heavily mismanage people (and their bottom line) by assuming every single minute spent on the job as recorded is linearly related to productivity. It’s not. You will lose out much more from the inefficiency begat by a toxic culture promoted by those wrong assumptions than the comparatively minuscule gains in imaginary labor value you put down on the accounting journals. There’s only so much you can squeeze from people, beyond that it’s delusion and negative gains. A good manager understands that the true resource is employee morale, trust, and loyalty; and you can’t get that without being realistic about what it means to treat employees like human beings. Jobs used to be 9 to 5, the 40-hour standard was based on half-baked quick math a clueless 10-year-old would’ve pulled out of their ass, and study after study after study shows nothing but positives both for employers and employees in more efficient and balanced work time structures than the current mass delusion standard.
According to ADP, the DoL, and the FLSA you’re wrong.
Can you require exempt employees to work certain hours?1
Employers are free to create work schedules for exempt employees however they see fit as long as they comply with any state and local regulations that govern meals and breaks.
Does an exempt employee have to work 40 hours a week?1
No, however, many businesses have company policies mandating a 40-hour workweek for exempt employees. Employers may take disciplinary action, including termination, against anyone who doesn’t fulfill that requirement, but they usually can’t deduct pay. Doing so might result in the employee no longer qualifying for the exemption.
Further you keep making comments about “fill the key responsibilities of your job description” like most workers have extremely specific job duties. This is not the case for salaried-exempt workers: 2
primary duty must be managing the enterprise…department…or subdivision of the enterprise; OR
primary duty includes the exercise of discretion and independent judgment with respect to matters of significance; OR
primary duty must be the performance of work requiring advanced knowledge, defined as work which is predominantly intellectual in character and which includes work requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment; AND The advanced knowledge must be in a field of science or learning; AND The advanced knowledge must be customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.
It’s high time people pushed back on this bullshit. Most people in office jobs can do their jobs effectively in well under 40 hours.
This is a terrible hill to die on. By that logic, most office jobs can be outsourced to India for a third of the cost if all you do is check off a list. If Employers have to deal with people double-dipping, they’ll pay a fraction of your salary for it.
A good manager understands that the true resource is employee morale, trust, and loyalty
It’s a two way street. Employees hiding the fact that they are working a second job during the time they are suppose to be working for you is a breach of trust as well.
study after study after study shows nothing but positives both for employers and employees in more efficient and balanced work time structures than the current mass delusion standard.
Wait a minute, now you’re trying to double-dip arguments! You can’t sit there are argue that the 40 hour work week is bad and inefficient and then claim that a person should be able to work two jobs simultaneously like it wouldn’t be even more inefficient or worse for work / life balance. It’s absurd that you’d even say that. Your comments more and more are incoherent ramblings of someone who hasn’t thought anything through and just wants to complain about work.
-You mean according to the law, I’m right, since it isn’t law that you’re required to work 40 hours, by definition of salaried exempt
-Yes, filling in key responsibilities is not a perfect science of what that means, which is is why the FLSA and it’s enforcing agency the DoL go out of their way to develop logical “tests” on what kind of work should qualify for salaried exempt, a small percentage of which you list (for some odd reason)
What’s wrong with checking off a list? Anything is checking off a list. That’s not a counter-argument. You’re just stating what you wish happens, but just stating assertions doesn’t make them true. Employers will get whatever the market will bear in terms of labor negotiations. If that means having to put up with “double-dipping”, witches, and bears oh my, idc.
Employees that meet the definition of salaried work and thus have freedom over their time earned from efficiency shouldn’t have a problem handling their duties. If they choose to work more for additional pay from someone else at the risk of burnout and expense of their leisure time, so be it. It’s not a marriage to an ultra-jealous controlling douchebag, even if you want it to be and redefine anything but complete submission as a “breach of trust”.
You are just being deliberately obtuse with hypotheticals. People should be allowed to work two jobs, if they are efficient and wish to sacrifice some of what should be their own time, provided they can actually handle it. Yes, the wins in efficiency by not forcing people to pretend to be productive for 40 hours are there. Anyone with a tenth of a brain that’s actually worked in a corporate environment will attest to that intuitively. That doesn’t mean in actuality, everyone will be able to work two jobs. Not everyone will have the same available energy left over, nor will choose to spend it that way. If someone wants to exert themselves further, let them. It’ll be up to them to manage the possibility of burnout, decide how temporary the situation will be, et cetera. Making another 100% (ballpark) of your salary is not a bad incentive in the short term at least, though companies won’t be handing out 100% salary bonuses for efficiency nor performance anytime soon. We all know how little a dollar goes these days, and how wages haven’t kept up with inflation for generations. This is one of the results of that.
-“Incoherent ramblings” you sound like a bad small-time manager that blames younger generations for their ineptitude as one. Seethe and keep getting left behind, all that grandstanding is only gonna get you brownie points with your fellow boomers, but it won’t actually help you navigate a changing labor market.
But that right there is the issue. Why should a company be allowed to prohibit employees from having a second job if it doesn’t conflict with the first one? And if a company does have that right, does it apply to all jobs? What is the difference in that case between working two jobs in the same industry in different market sectors vs working two retail jobs?
Another POV: if I incorporated myself tomorrow and offered what I do for a living as a professional service, then I become the company and the companies that hire me for my services become the client. Do clients have the right to say I can’t take on other clients? (FWIW I have seen some clients try that and get shut down immediately, and I’ve also never heard of any company agreeing to those terms with a client.)
Why should a company be allowed to prohibit employees from having a second job
Different Topic IMO. If someone wants to work 9-5 at an office job, then go work at Target from 6-10 in theory that’s fine. I don’t support it as someone that’s read the studies about productivity of the 40 hour work week being poor, I know that doing so is not sustainable and it’s not a good idea. Should a company be able to stop you from doing it? I don’t know. I’m open to the idea. It’s a far more nuanced topic though. Along the same lines are how to treat outside of work drug use. I see no reason a person can’t smoke Pot off the clock, but I don’t want to extend that to hard drugs.
…f it doesn’t conflict with the first one?
That’s been my argument since the start. Working two jobs during the same hours is conflicting. The stories I’ve read of high paid tech workers double-dipping during Covid were working both jobs during the same hours. Every time they ignore something from Job 1 because they are working on Job 2, it’s conflicting. Same could be said for WFH users who treat it like they are home on a weekend doing chores, supervising children etc. It’s not the same thing.
What is the difference in that case between working two jobs in the same industry in different market sectors vs working two retail jobs?
Usually a high level of proprietary or non-public information to start. But you wouldn’t be working at Target and Walmart from 5-10 tonight walking back and forth between the two stores. So just at a base level they aren’t comparable.
if I incorporated myself tomorrow…Do clients have the right to say I can’t take on other clients?
Absolutely allowed, but not likely. You are entering into a private contract with a company and agreeing between you on what you are do to be doing. Your contract is going to be far more specific than an employment agreement, and it’s up to you to cover all the things they would have covered including: Health Insurance, Payroll taxes, Retirement, Liability Insurance, etc. Keep in mind creating your own LLC or Corp is different than being a 1099 subcontractor. There are certain IRS rules that you have to make sure are followed (well the employer side mostly) else they can get hit with penalties for misclassifying workers as non-employees.
We have some subcontractors on staff, but afaik they sign agreements on availability and are more or less treated like employees when it comes to work output. They may have specific clauses they’ve negotiated on availability or things like that, but that’s also true of some employees too.
Not really. If they’re fulfilling their contractual obligations to their employer(s), then who the hell cares?
It’s long past time that we stop treating employees like they’re chattel of the company that they work for. You hire someone to do a job, which they either do to your satisfaction or not, but you don’t own them and you shouldn’t get to control the parameters of their life.
They aren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations if they aren’t allowed to have a second job and are doing it anyway, so this notion is nonsense to begin with. If you get paid hourly you can’t be working for someone else while getting paid by the first company for the same time. For salaried, typically there are expectations of how long you’ll be working or even your availability.
The company I work for has more than three decades of experience with WFH, and it’s almost always clear when someone is trying to double dip. It’s impossible to keep it hidden for long. Eventually you will have conflicting schedules, and excuses start piling up. Even if the work is good, very few jobs are done in a vacuum where you never need to talk to anyone or work things through. Most situations like that are handled by subcontractors who have all the freedoms you’re talking about. In fact the only situation I can even think of that would fit the mold of how work is being framed here is through contractors.
Salaried exempt positions should fit that mold nicely.
That’s a whole other topic.
Same topic, bud.
It has nothing to do with double dipping or the way the article describes it which isn’t really what the word means. Having two jobs you work during different hours is usually fine. Working them during the same hours is the issue.
You can assert that it’s a “problem” all you want, it doesn’t make it true. Salaried exempt has a definition which is compatible, in abstract, with working two jobs in the same working day or week span. It has to do with being able to fill the key responsibilities of your job description on a given day or week. If you fulfill those, the rest of the time is yours to do whatever you want with. The expectation is that on the other hand you will work overtime if needed to complete those key aspects without additional pay. That’s the definition in a nutshell. You adding stipulations about time and “double dipping”, et cetera is fabrication. That’s just what companies eventually pushed into being normalized as unwritten law in an ever-present desire to squeeze every single imaginary accounting cent they can out of their most expensive assets. It’s high time people pushed back on this bullshit. Most people in office jobs can do their jobs effectively in well under 40 hours. One of the reasons there’s so much bureacracy and time wasting in corporate environments is so people can fill up that arbitrary amount of time without 😱 looking like they’re doing their jobs in less than 40 hours. Businesses heavily mismanage people (and their bottom line) by assuming every single minute spent on the job as recorded is linearly related to productivity. It’s not. You will lose out much more from the inefficiency begat by a toxic culture promoted by those wrong assumptions than the comparatively minuscule gains in imaginary labor value you put down on the accounting journals. There’s only so much you can squeeze from people, beyond that it’s delusion and negative gains. A good manager understands that the true resource is employee morale, trust, and loyalty; and you can’t get that without being realistic about what it means to treat employees like human beings. Jobs used to be 9 to 5, the 40-hour standard was based on half-baked quick math a clueless 10-year-old would’ve pulled out of their ass, and study after study after study shows nothing but positives both for employers and employees in more efficient and balanced work time structures than the current mass delusion standard.
According to ADP, the DoL, and the FLSA you’re wrong.
Can you require exempt employees to work certain hours? 1
Does an exempt employee have to work 40 hours a week? 1
Further you keep making comments about “fill the key responsibilities of your job description” like most workers have extremely specific job duties. This is not the case for salaried-exempt workers: 2
This is a terrible hill to die on. By that logic, most office jobs can be outsourced to India for a third of the cost if all you do is check off a list. If Employers have to deal with people double-dipping, they’ll pay a fraction of your salary for it.
It’s a two way street. Employees hiding the fact that they are working a second job during the time they are suppose to be working for you is a breach of trust as well.
Wait a minute, now you’re trying to double-dip arguments! You can’t sit there are argue that the 40 hour work week is bad and inefficient and then claim that a person should be able to work two jobs simultaneously like it wouldn’t be even more inefficient or worse for work / life balance. It’s absurd that you’d even say that. Your comments more and more are incoherent ramblings of someone who hasn’t thought anything through and just wants to complain about work.
-You mean according to the law, I’m right, since it isn’t law that you’re required to work 40 hours, by definition of salaried exempt
-Yes, filling in key responsibilities is not a perfect science of what that means, which is is why the FLSA and it’s enforcing agency the DoL go out of their way to develop logical “tests” on what kind of work should qualify for salaried exempt, a small percentage of which you list (for some odd reason)
What’s wrong with checking off a list? Anything is checking off a list. That’s not a counter-argument. You’re just stating what you wish happens, but just stating assertions doesn’t make them true. Employers will get whatever the market will bear in terms of labor negotiations. If that means having to put up with “double-dipping”, witches, and bears oh my, idc.
Employees that meet the definition of salaried work and thus have freedom over their time earned from efficiency shouldn’t have a problem handling their duties. If they choose to work more for additional pay from someone else at the risk of burnout and expense of their leisure time, so be it. It’s not a marriage to an ultra-jealous controlling douchebag, even if you want it to be and redefine anything but complete submission as a “breach of trust”.
You are just being deliberately obtuse with hypotheticals. People should be allowed to work two jobs, if they are efficient and wish to sacrifice some of what should be their own time, provided they can actually handle it. Yes, the wins in efficiency by not forcing people to pretend to be productive for 40 hours are there. Anyone with a tenth of a brain that’s actually worked in a corporate environment will attest to that intuitively. That doesn’t mean in actuality, everyone will be able to work two jobs. Not everyone will have the same available energy left over, nor will choose to spend it that way. If someone wants to exert themselves further, let them. It’ll be up to them to manage the possibility of burnout, decide how temporary the situation will be, et cetera. Making another 100% (ballpark) of your salary is not a bad incentive in the short term at least, though companies won’t be handing out 100% salary bonuses for efficiency nor performance anytime soon. We all know how little a dollar goes these days, and how wages haven’t kept up with inflation for generations. This is one of the results of that.
-“Incoherent ramblings” you sound like a bad small-time manager that blames younger generations for their ineptitude as one. Seethe and keep getting left behind, all that grandstanding is only gonna get you brownie points with your fellow boomers, but it won’t actually help you navigate a changing labor market.
But that right there is the issue. Why should a company be allowed to prohibit employees from having a second job if it doesn’t conflict with the first one? And if a company does have that right, does it apply to all jobs? What is the difference in that case between working two jobs in the same industry in different market sectors vs working two retail jobs?
Another POV: if I incorporated myself tomorrow and offered what I do for a living as a professional service, then I become the company and the companies that hire me for my services become the client. Do clients have the right to say I can’t take on other clients? (FWIW I have seen some clients try that and get shut down immediately, and I’ve also never heard of any company agreeing to those terms with a client.)
Different Topic IMO. If someone wants to work 9-5 at an office job, then go work at Target from 6-10 in theory that’s fine. I don’t support it as someone that’s read the studies about productivity of the 40 hour work week being poor, I know that doing so is not sustainable and it’s not a good idea. Should a company be able to stop you from doing it? I don’t know. I’m open to the idea. It’s a far more nuanced topic though. Along the same lines are how to treat outside of work drug use. I see no reason a person can’t smoke Pot off the clock, but I don’t want to extend that to hard drugs.
That’s been my argument since the start. Working two jobs during the same hours is conflicting. The stories I’ve read of high paid tech workers double-dipping during Covid were working both jobs during the same hours. Every time they ignore something from Job 1 because they are working on Job 2, it’s conflicting. Same could be said for WFH users who treat it like they are home on a weekend doing chores, supervising children etc. It’s not the same thing.
Usually a high level of proprietary or non-public information to start. But you wouldn’t be working at Target and Walmart from 5-10 tonight walking back and forth between the two stores. So just at a base level they aren’t comparable.
Absolutely allowed, but not likely. You are entering into a private contract with a company and agreeing between you on what you are do to be doing. Your contract is going to be far more specific than an employment agreement, and it’s up to you to cover all the things they would have covered including: Health Insurance, Payroll taxes, Retirement, Liability Insurance, etc. Keep in mind creating your own LLC or Corp is different than being a 1099 subcontractor. There are certain IRS rules that you have to make sure are followed (well the employer side mostly) else they can get hit with penalties for misclassifying workers as non-employees.
We have some subcontractors on staff, but afaik they sign agreements on availability and are more or less treated like employees when it comes to work output. They may have specific clauses they’ve negotiated on availability or things like that, but that’s also true of some employees too.