Overtime or Over Time?

The corporate world pretty much tries to follow the labor law rules like compensting non-exempt employees for their overtime.  Any hours over 40 hours worked in a work week, is considered overtime and should be paid at time and a half.  Non exempt employees – are really non salaried, or hourly employees.  Positions that fall under this category are administrative assistants, secretaries, mail clerks, receptionists etc.  The management staff like associates, managers, etc don’t get overtime for hours worked past 40 hours a week because they are compensated for that extra time through other means like bonuses or company shares.

There are companies/government offices that don’t pay overtime to any of their employees.  For the most part, these employees are the ones who work more than 60 hours a week. Their way of compesating the employee for their overtime is to give them comp time.  Comp time is time on the books that an individual can withdraw when needing time off without touching their vacation/personal or sick time.  The plus side, their vacation is not used and is accrued.  the negative to it is most times these employees work so hard, they are unable to take all of the comp time.  The companies will only accrue up to a month of vacation time.  Any other vacation time that is not used will be lost.

So what’s best in this economy?  Working overtime and getting paid or working over 40 hours and saving all that time that you could never use and losing it?  This is a no brainer. 

Shouldn’t all non-exempt employees be treated equally across the board?  Why doesn’t anyone do something about this.  Why can some companies say non exempt employees are not working on a salary vs hourly basis, just os they don’t get paid the overtime? and Some other companies pay overtime for non-exempt employees?  Why do we have labor laws? There seems to be laws to protect the employer but what happens to the laws for the employees?

The laws should  be the same for everyone.  This is one of the problems why the economy is getting worse.  Every company/organization/government office is always looking for a loophole to minimize the worth of the indidivudal.  Whatever happened to the employees rights?