Where else do you have someone who works 60 hours a week and then goes home and continues to improve their skills which is a benefit to the employer?

How many times have you been stuck and had to call your IT resource to get you out of trouble?

With all these computers, what would you do without all the knowledgable IT people?

This is just a continuation of corporations moving responsibility down to lower levels and then reducing salaries as they go.

People used to work 16 hour days so they started labor laws to cut work to 40 hour weeks.
Then they began to classify employees as "exempt" so they were exempt from overtime pay.
Now you can work employees for 60-80 hours a week and not pay them overtime. One step foreward - two steps back. There needs to be a stipulation that a certain amount of overtime for a coutinued period of time qualifies an exempt employee for overtime compensation (and not at the disgression of the manager).

What happened the last time our congress negated laws protecting "We The People"?
Oh yes, we went into a recession because the banks reduced the qualifications for home mortgages!
We need to start to make laws "stick". They were made for a reason.
Now we have to work for years to get ourselves back to a place where we can even hope to
live and retire as well as our parents did.

We're screwed. Let's fight for the next generation at least!!

I, too, think it's too late for our generation and anything we can do will benefit the next one.

Thanks for your input. It does hurt to see truly intelligent and valuable people treated this way while number-crunchers at financial institutions are both highly paid and richly rewarded because the banks say "we have to pay to keep our best people". MOST ESPECIALLY since those "best people" purposefully drove the rest of us into a ditch and yet continue to get the pay and bonuses!

ps - Aren't you usually watching Ed right about now?

is that in IT, the only thing that stops (at 40 hours) is the pay

and since work after the 40th hour is free, they want heavy unpaid overtime

40 hours is about the right amount of work for th ehuman mind/body - after 40 hours, producivity wanes and mind/body are overworked

the cruel irony of 'the 40 hour week', is that it went from a maximum limit, to a minimum requirement, with forced work for free (aka 'slavery') after the 40th hour

It pays $30/hour.

I wanted $35.

What do you think? Am I getting ripped off?

I can't even get an $8.00/hr job, IT or otherwise. I made $90k in 1998.

IF you work a 40 hr week (and somehow they always seem to make sure their 'contract' employees don't) then:

$30/hr = 1200/wk = 62,400/year GROSS PAY.

As a contractor, I believe you need to pay your own
Taxes (including Soc. Sec. and any local taxes),
Life and Health Insurance, and
Retirement savings.

Depending on your age, try roughing out some figures for the above list and see if you believe you will be left with a 'living wage'.

Most of the younger 'contractors' I know are trying to make it work without paying for health insurance and hoping nothing happens to them (or their family).

p.s. - Contractors usually don't have any long or short term disability pay or insurance either so your on-going health is also an issue.

Is there a way to keep it and go on a contract?

My pay maximum is 1000 a month (which should be lifted to 2,500 a month IMHO)

I've been wondering since the 2000's if some of these Democrats weren't simply Republi-plants. There just seem to be more and more of them that don't vote like Democrats anymore. Is it just the corporate money or could it be more? I don't put ANYTHING past the Republican party since Rove.

silicon valley types have an odd combination of favoring both 'liberal' social policies, and slave labor for their own workplaces. so, starting in the late 1990s, they started shoveling cash into the democratic party ( as well as republcians), and democrats sold it workers down the river as far as they could

I had a partner at a 'big 4' accounting/consulting firm tell me that they deliberatly scheduled heavy overtime for one reson, and one reason only - people worked for free after the 40th hour

i was up for management, and he considered this to be 'showing me the ropes'. i quit as soon as i could and became an hourly contractor

'exempt' is the biggest screw job in the world. a large percent of 'exempt' managerial/profession are computer programmers would dont supervise anyone

as far as 'professional' goes, try going to a lawyer or a doctor after 5 and telling them that is should be free, since it's above a 40 hour work week

both parties and corporations have really, really had it in for IT workers in the last 15 year, super vicious stuff

The guys who actually hooked up and ran the the networks used to be hourly, as it was considered more like a telephone lineman than a "professional". And so they used to get OT. Higher level IT like software developers has been exempt forever.

The powers that be realized they were paying a lot for helpdesk and network ops people, so they've been gradually considered "professional". It's one of the reasons they came up with certifications like A+, Network+, and MSCE - those mean you're a certified professional!

And yes, it's a way to screw over the peons for more management cash.

That's because everyone discovered how little people who came to this country on H1B visas would take to do the work.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of those 'workers' didn't really know what they needed to know to do the job right --but they just didn't care.


Working as a contractor is great as long as the pay covers all the taxes and benefits you need to pay for yourself but most that I know couldn't do it AND support a family unless they are able to charge amazing rates.


And you know what else? You may be young, or not - I don't know - but many of us grew up, got our education and went for the jobs that would pay adequately, including overtime, and included benefits and had a pension. It wasn't an outrageous assumption when I started working, it was the norm. But then our CEO's at the time didn't make thousands of times per year what an average employee made. AND, believe it or not, the company I worked for had bad quarters now and then and the whole place didn't fall apart because the stock fell a few pennies -- I will never get over how things have changed so much that we are all now supposed to believe that every quarter can be a profitable one! How unrealistic can you be?!

Sorry. I sort of went off on a tangent there.

But I'm happy for you if you're happy with your situation.

i wont go into the details of how things turned out for me, but i was in NO WAY suggesting that going hourly contractor was anything beyond the most temporary refuge from the abuses i was fleeing

when i said

"both parties and corporations have really, really had it in for IT workers in the last 15 year..."

what i meant, was that they used h-1b as a baseball bat on guys like me with a message, 'you can run. but you cant hide'

i have always considered the 1998 (first) increase in h-1b, to be a counter counter measure to people who went contractor to evade the salaried overtime abuses

measure - salaried overtime abuse

counter measure - going hourly contrctor

counter counter measure - flooding the market with h-1bs

spy vs spy

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) 2007 Global Alumni Conference -- Santa Clara, California, July 6, 2007. Hillary Clinton reassured the Indian lobbyists and American corporations that she supports an expanded H-1B visa program

but I don't know what they can be other than big business money in her coffers.

There aren't many Dems that I can actually say are what I was brought up to believe Dems are.

She may even have educated Billy Boy to what too many believe are the 'necessary games' to play to get and keep political power; he did, after all, get rid of Glass-Steagall on his way out the door (as if no one would remember it was his doing).

I've been saying for a while now we could use a real party for the working class again - maybe the US needs a Labor Party of it's own.

and there has never been overtime... just part of the job...

as we are at the higher end of the wage brackets... they figure for what we get paid it's only fair...