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OT question follow up re; exempt vs. non exempt

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K

kmid

Guest
What is the name of your state? ny
cbg, thanks for the response. i do not understand what the difference is between "exempt" and "non-exempt" employees. i do know that at the company i worked for these terms were used to differentiate between salaried "management" employees and hourly "non management" employees. however, there are employees in the company considered "exempt" and who are salaried but who do not actually supervise or make management decisions and consistently work more than 40 hours per week without OT. are there any particular characterisitics that would define the difference between exempt and non exempt employees? for example; my salaried exempt assistants were expected by upper management to consistently work overtime with out pay, if they did not comply they were counseled, written up for "failure to perform job responsibilites" and then ostracized/badgered to the point that they quit. i could also have been written up for not 'properly training and developing my staff'. my assistants did not make any final decisions regarding business direction nor were they required to hire, fire or train other employees. while they may have asked other employees for help with their assignments they were following the direction from myself and my supervisors. they were not ultimately responsible for independently creating the assignments and could not fire, write up, or in any way effect another employee for failure to follow their direction. in my opinion, they were employees who had been suckered into believing that their position was a promotion just because it was salaried.
 


Beth3

Senior Member
Exempt and non-exempt are legal terms. They literally mean "exempt from overtime pay" and obviously non-exempt means the reverse. A federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, defines which types of positions quality for exempt status, which all fall in one of four categories: executive (i.e. managerial), administrative, professional, and sales. Any job that doesn't meet the criteria for exemption in one of these categories is by default, non-exempt, and the employer must pay OT. There are no circumstances under which an employer must pay an exempt employee OT and very few laws (only at the State level) which put any limits on work hours and even then, only on how many consecutive days a person can be required to work without a day off.

Defining all these here would really take too much time and be quite lengthy, so I suggest you go to the DOL web site (www.dol.gov) where you can read the FLSA in it's entirety, plus you may want to do some simple internet searches on the FLSA or exempt/non-exempt which might lead you to some abbreviated information.

Assuming your employer has correctly classified which jobs are exempt, then nothing they are doing is illegal. Dumb maybe but not against the law.
 

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