About 10% of US adults don’t have a bank account. I would guess such people are disproportionately low-wage workers. They get their paycheck and go to a check cashing place and use cash and prepaid debit cards to pay their bills.
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That’s weird.
When I worked for a house-painter we got paid for travel-time to, but not from, remote locations.
When I work in an office, travel-time, mileage, and expenses apply to all remote work. If I drive five miles for work, it gets expensed.
AND reimbursed.
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At the very least it’s tax deductible, as it doesn’t sound like a regular commuting cost.
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Technically, just being an engineer doesn’t qualify you as exempt. There are several other metrics such as managing others, setting your own work hours, etc. If the company doesn’t meet enough of those requirements, they could be on the hook for back wages.
What I find interesting is that some skilled employees don’t want to be hourly. They think there’s some status in being salaried which is ludicrous since I’ve seen lawyers that are paid as much as $800, by the hour. You ask one of those legal dudes to work an extra hour and it will cost you…$800.
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Yeah. I never really got the whole prestige angle of salary work. Being salaried just means that the company has the possibility of owning 100% of your time, instead of just the 8 hours a day plus whatever overtime you agree to. The salary means you have to get the job done no matter how long it takes, and overtime goes away. That doesn’t sound at all prestigious, unless one’s idea of honor means taking unnecessary risks to make someone who has more money than you even richer.
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California just past changed the law to allow the companies using third party labor to be held accountable if the contractor breaks wage laws, unsafe work conditions etc… This case I think in California will bypass the courts and go to the wage board, which is very very pro employee. It will be appealed but our legislature will probably change the laws to support wage board.
I used to work retail and during christmas we had to park a distance from the mall and they provided buses to get us from that point to work. We where not compensated for that time, however because they told us when to be there what bus to be on I think if a complaint was filed the wage board would say employees would need to be paid for that time.
I’ve spent time on this site almost daily since it went live.
The stuff you guys find cool – and advertise with affiliate links – is very often stuff I also find cool - so I click the ad’s link and check it out…and if it’s something I need or cannot live without well, you know…Please Continue.
(thanks!)
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That would be totally unimaginable in Netherland. Here, your salary is paid to your bank account. If you don’t have a bank account, you can’t have a job. (And yes, that is absolutely an obstacle for homeless people to re-enter the job market: to get a bank account, you need a home address; to get an address, you need a house; to get a house, you need a job. I believe there are charities that provide mail addresses for this reason.)
That is very different from Netherland. Here, a salary simply means you have a steady job for a steady monthly salary for an agreed-upon number of hours per week (usually 40, 38, 36 or 32). If you’re asked to work more, you still get overtime. Unless you’re a manager or otherwise carry a certain amount of responsibility with a corresponding amount of power. I’m not sure where the line between those two lies exactly. It’s fuzzy, and it’s probably in your contract. I don’t recall a company ever being abusive about it.
That’s typically the way things go around here as well. 
It’s just that our fuzzy zone is really big.
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The upside of being salaried is that your employer can’t (as easily) cut your hours and pay you less because they aren’t so busy, your paycheck will be stable over time, and often hours worked are not even measured.
But, like basically everything related to employment, if the balance of bargaining power is tilted very heavily toward the employer the details will end up shifting costs onto the employee and benefits onto the employer.
Recall the recent story about algorithmic employee scheduling which allows employers to much more closely match the hours of hourly employees to demand at the cost of short and unpredictable (both in time and space) shifts for those employees and should increase the fraction of hours worked which are ‘intense’ vs ‘slack’.
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Are zero hour contracts a thing in the US?
I used to work somewhere with lots of senior engineers and a shortage of junior managers. They couldn’t convince anyone to take the ‘promotion’ since the payrise was less than the overtime pay that would be lost by going to the salaried position.
I also worked for a large engineering company in the UK that transitioned all its engineeers to salaried roles as part of ‘Modern Working Practices’, with an expected level of (unpaid) overtime work above the standard work week.
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It’s called “fridge”. 
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Not at my house. That’s just nasty.
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