FLSA
I know this is an EHS Blog. But at heart I am just a foundry supervisor they made a personnel supervisor, and on the second day the “Safety Guy.” That was in 1980. Back in college as a Personnel/Management major I had taken a class in the Fair Labor Standards Act. This FLSA course was to be the most beneficial class I ever had as an undergraduate and graduate student. In addition, prior to becoming a foundry supervisor I had been a management trainee, and in this program, we had several hours of orientation on being a “Salaried Exempt Employee” and how my role was different than the typical hourly worker. They taught us that there were professional, legal, and ethical components to my role unlike a typical hourly worker. Much of what I learned here was right out of the FLSA.
The FLSA has applied to my life for 44 years as a Supervisor, Personnel/HR Manager, and Plant Manager, as an employee myself and a manager of people. I had to deal with it every day until my retirement from the Corporate World in late 2017. My days of being an employee and manager of other people were over.
I was always paid a market level salary. On top of that even though I was always an exempt employee I was paid overtime as supervisor, even though not strictly as an hourly employee. As I became a level above supervisor, I was paid a bonus and or profit sharing in addition to my salary that overall compensated me very well. My last several years I even made it to the “Highly Compensated Level” mentioned in the FLSA. I never made it to the Executive Level where the Bonus and Stock Options are often much more than annual salaries.
I was lucky, but too many companies have exploited their employees. They made people “assistant managers” in name only. They have made their employees work well over 40 hours per week and paid them ridiculously low salaries with no overtime! Calling them “managers” they did not pay OT. Now the Feds are cracking down! Now there is new criteria for a job to classified as “Salary Exempt.” New rule below.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime/rulemaking
