BossFeed, the week in work: time bandits; make it work moments; secret schedules; and they have not yet begun to fight.
Clock-blocked
The Obama Administration recently announced new overtime rules that ensure companies can’t just decree that low-paid workers have “salaried” positions and “managerial” responsibilities, make them work well over 40 hours a week without any real independent authority, and get out of paying them time-and-a-half.
These poverty-wage salaried jobs are particularly common in fast food and retail… which is probably why the National Retail Federation is so upset about the new rules they wrote a loopy statement which clarifies that the President would qualify for overtime if he worked more than 40 hours a week and was paid less than $50,000/year, insists that “careers are the path to success, not time clocks", and frets that the new rules will “turn salaried professionals into clock watchers.” Weird how their dystopian version of being a front-line manager sounds like it might have been inspired by one too many viewings of the opening sequence of Days of our Lives.
Be employees, b-e employees
Projecting enthusiasm is a big part of a whole lot of jobs — especially when your supervisor is around. But for cheerleaders, projecting enthusiasm is the entire job. Except that NFL cheerleaders are often not considered employees, so technically speaking, they don’t even have jobs. Some of them aren’t even paid, even though NFL teams bank billions of dollars a year.
After cheerleaders organized and filed lawsuits from Oakland to Cincinnati to Buffalo, California legislators passed a new bill which would ensure that workers who perform "acrobatics, dance, or gymnastics" get basic labor rights, like, say, minimum wage. It currently awaits the Governor’s signature.
Your schedule is no longer one of Victoria’s Secrets
Under pressure from a BuzzFeed investigation (the publication does some good work, but that’s still a strange combination of words), Victoria’s Secret announced last week they would eliminate on-call scheduling for retail workers. No longer will their employees be required to be available for shifts that can be cancelled at any time without compensation. The practice of on-call scheduling remains widespread, however — so we can’t declare victory at least until Gawker runs an expose on Frederick’s of Hollywood.
So it begins
A beaver attacked two Oregon men who climbed on top of its dam, throwing them into the Deschutes River. The Sheriff was called in but took no action.
A large-clawed turtle that looks like that weird pointy kind of cauliflower crawled out of a river and bit through sticks, scaring the citizens of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Siberia. It later swam away and was not turned into soup.
A robot killed a worker at a Volkswagen plant in Germany, grabbing the man and crushing him against a metal plate. The company is investigating if “human error” is to blame.