Overtime pay

You can do plenty of quality work in 40 hours. And how much of an investment is it when you're giving your labor away for free?

Put it this way. Say you make $12 an hour. 10 hours of OT a week is $180 a week, or $9K a year for 50 weeks.

You do that job for five years, you're giving up $45K in your pocket.

How many years do you think it will take to make up that $45K?

 

Exempt!

 

Every situation is unique, so there's no blanket prescription for this issue. We are all special snowflakes.

 

Have you considered a greeting card career?

 

The only route is using experience and communication if/when you change shops — but more often than not, overtime is a dirty word. We all KNOW that sports coverage usually requires massive overtime. Discuss it with those in charge — before you touch the first key.

 

That's what an investment is. You are sacrificing time (or money) now for a payoff in the future.

If I build a reputation for quality work, I can use that to open doors for myself down the road, either inside this industry or outside it. Whether or not the company I'm presently working for cares about the product is irrelevant to that decision.

 

If you sacrifice five years of overtime, are you confident you'll make up that $45K on top of what you're making in your new gig?

Or, to put it another way, say you do your $25K a year job for five years, sacrificing the overtime. Then you move on to a $36K gig for another five years. Which sounds nice, but they also don't want to pay you for overtime.

So now, instead of making $27 an hour in overtime for an $18/hour job, which would be $270 for 10 hours of overtime a week, or $14K a year, you are earn your money back in four years with the $11K a year raise that you're getting that you've sacrificed for in the previous job. But now, after five years at the new gig, you are now $70K in the hole. So 10 years into your career, you're going to have to find a $46K a year gig, and spend seven years there just to make up what you missed in overtime from your second gig. And hope they pay overtime.

 

You could call it an investment. Or you could call it a pyramid scheme. Sacrificing time and money now for a potential payoff in the future.

It's not mutually exclusive, that you either work a ton of unpaid overtime or you do quality enough work to move onward and upward and enjoy a successful career - in whatever field you're in.

There are "suits" in the world - even though they may be a minority in the newspaper biz - who believe you'll get the best out of employees if they are treated with respect, compensated fairly and given a fair workload, with the expectation that they have a reasonable work-life balance.

Or you can work 80 hours, get paid for 40 and feel oh-so-lucky you have a job and that it might pay dividends down the line. Good luck, because if those bosses get used to shitting on you in that way, how much do you think they'll hesitate to shit on you when it comes to laying people off?

 

That's still an investment.

Sure. I never meant to imply otherwise. This was the comment I was responding to: "And if the company doesn't care enough about the product that they have money invested in, then why do you?"

I care about the product because my name is on it, and therefore I will put in the work I feel is necessary to uphold my personal standards, regardless of the company's expectations. On a given week that might mean 2 hours of free overtime, or 20, or none. Or I might go to the beach, come in late and run my photos really big.

 

And you de-value your product if you clock out right at 40 and not show up the rest of the week.

Consumers (and publishers) will pay for a quality product.

 

It's not "my product". It's the company's. I'm just hired help.

And no, publishers won't pay for a quality product. If they did, they'd be paying you the overtime already.

 

You can see a bright and clear line between the older people here and the younger people here.

No matter how much you love the newspaper, it will never love you back.

The reality is that, if the unpaid overtime is to learn a new skill, say social media management, you could consider that an investment. Most unpaid OT is not that though.

It is helping take calls, because they laid the clerk off or helping out with Friday night football because one of the preps guys got cut loose.