wisconsin to force workers to work 7 days without a break

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"assistant managers" at mickey-Ds do not get over time, and they make a pittance. I have worked "mcjobs" that did not pay overtime, they were DBAs and if they got in trouble they'd close up and reopen elsewhere under another name. there are many ways for employers to evade the law. the law is porous at best. you can be declared "a salaried employee" strictly at the employer's discretion, no matter what you do, and thus lose overtime protection. and jobs are so hard to get for even college graduates that they are a largely captive audience, in most areas. IOW most folk do NOT have the luxury to tell their thievin' boss to shove it and seek work elsewhere because there is no work elsewhere to be had.

not all of us are smart enough to graduate straight As from uni. the working class deserves to not be spat upon as "disposable" because we are human beings and NOT animals. and ALL humans [not just the high and mighty] need and deserve periodic rest.

Oh, enough with the Capitalism bashing.

At least Capitalism allows for the opportunity for personal achievement. The lie is that "leveling the playing field" makes things fair for everybody. What Socialism and Communism do, is grant everyone equal poverty, while the Elitists who run the show benefit from everyone else's labor - and isn't that the very thing you're accusing Capitalists of doing?

At least the Capitalists will let you join their club and become one of them, if you're ambitious and talented enough to climb up there, of course nobody's forcing you - you can remain as middle class, or as poor as you care to. The choice is yours - and that's the key - CHOICE. When private property is eliminated, you have no choice, except to become one of the faceless masses and do what you're told, because you, as an individual, are meaningless, except as a slave to The State.

Unions, in the US had their place and their time, and they did a lot of good - for a while. But their greedy corrupt leaders, in the name of The Worker, have demanded so much, that they've strangled the Golden Goose that feeds them. Blame the Capitalist owners until you're blue in the face, but you can't expect rational businessmen not to outsource jobs when the union demands are decimating your profit margins. No entrepreneur creates a business, sacrifices personal investment and effort, to make other people wealthy.

The fact is, American Greed has been its own worst enemy. I have no love for corporate suits, to whom the bottom line and this quarter's bonus are more important than the lives of the people who help make them possible, but its also true that if a line worker wants a bigger house or a $100,000 car, he or she needs to start their own business, not expect to be paid $80 an hour to screw in bolts.

Personally, I worked my entire career in a Right to Work State and I'm grateful for it, because it meant I could take a job wherever one was offered - if Boss A fired me, I could walk across the street and go to work for Boss B, no harm, no foul. The non-compete contracts those businesses would have demanded from a union, in exchange for higher wages (which did happen in neighboring states), would have forced me to move hundreds of miles from home to find a new job. Fine for some people, but unacceptable to me.

If you want to point a finger at someone, point it at the bankers and politicians, who allow greed on both sides of the table, to run amok, unchecked. I saw the industry of my profession go from a comfortable Mom and Pop local market concern, to a Mega-Corporation puppet show in barely more than a single decade, thanks entirely to deregulation on the part of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. It wasn't a Democrat or Republican thing, it was a politician and banker thing. The American system works - until we allow lawyers and bankers to take hold of all our public offices, instead of honest citizens.

Of course, allowing a private central bank to manufacture our currency, using Keynesian Economics to ratchet up the cycles of inflation, and the lack of Gold Standard to anchor our currency have made it a total clusterfrack, but that's all thanks to the lawyers and bankers.

ETA; I addressed my questions in this post to Aunt Blabby. Someone else posted while I was writing this and I didn't want it to be confusing about who I was asking.

If a boss gives you a salaried position then you may have minimum hours you have to work but overtime won't be required unless someone calls in or something isn't done that needs to get done. The small businesses that close up and open up elsewhere to evade the law and do things like that aren't going to be aboveboard anyway. They may have people there who can't get other jobs and they take advantage of or they may have people there who work out an agreement with them to suit both the boss and the employee. While some people won't know enough to walk out or stand up for themselves, there are many more who do. Don't write off all the blue collar workers as not smart enough to know how to work things to their advantage please, many of them are. Many are barely getting by and really are stuck in a horrible job but that isn't the norm. Most people do know that they need to start looking for another job and they will put up with the crap job for a while and when they find a better one they quit. Lots of people learn this kind of lesson early on in their working lives. Teenagers especially dont know about things and can be taken advantage of, but they do learn quick and they get out of there and find something else, thats why you rarely see a 35 year old working at the drive through who has been there since he was 16 and could legally work. It's not right to do that but it's a far cry from a slippery slope that will lead to us being poor class slaves to the elite.

It's a pretty good economic decision to make assistant managers salaried. Managers are, and asst mgr's are usually presumed to be people who want to stay there and move up into management and while they work the weekends and nights and fill in when somebody calls in and do work more than 40 hours, it's considered learning and kind of "paying dues" or earning the chance to be promoted to management. Most places don't have that kind of setup with kitchen and counter folks who do shift work. The salaries they would offer would be 40 hours at minimum wage and they would be sometimes required to work much more than that. Nobody would take that job no matter how much he wanted to save for a car or put more money back for college or needed to find work to help out the family. Those kind of jobs aren't usually looked at as a stepping stone to a career although some do move up to asst mgr. I worked as asst mgr at a convenience store several times and got hourly wages but I had to fill in when people called in and I had to come in on my off day to do things and I worked longer than 8 hours because I did the deposits etc. I got paid overtime for it, and because I could choose to come in and do things that needed to be done but weren't, I racked up a lot of overtime. It was a chain and our store looked good and my boss was happy with me so he didn't mind paying it. I also owned a convenience store before, out in the country when we first married and we hired another cashier to work when I wasn't there or the other guy who owned it with us, and we paid salary and not hourly. We did that because it was a small store, didn't make much money and we needed a fixed amount to pay weekly. Sometimes the person worked less, other times more. It all depended and it was discussed when they were interviewed.

Sketchy places that don't pay right are all over the place. My youngest son worked for a while at the Arab store here in town, which is what everybody called it because it was owned by the only Arabs in town and it was a small convenience store/liqour store and they never bothered to put up a sign with a name or anything. They paid him different amounts each day depending on how much business they did. Sometimes it wasn't much and he would get mad and tell them he wasn't working his ass off all day long stocking stuff and cleaning to get $30 for about 8 or 9 hours and some free Mtn Dew and chips to have while working and he would tell them he wouldn't be back and they would come off more money. So did the other guy who worked there with him. It wasn't legal at all and they were paid cash and it wasn't reported and the boys were 16 and 17 years old and working in the liqour store stocking the booze and everything. They aren't supposed to be in it by law, let alone touching the bottles lest it corrupt their innocent minds or something, but they did. Those are the places that screw people over and if somebody really needs the job and it's the only one around then the owners have them over a barrel and they know it. But again, they are few and far between. Also, the store was across the street from the PD so everybody knew the boys were working there and nobody minded. If their parents said it was ok then it was let go, after all it was honest work and boxes of booze are heavy. We didn't mind him doing it because it was his idea and we knew he wouldn't just bend over for them.

The jobs that people do as a career to support their families most often are the factory and trades work, and those places know they aren't going to get quality work if they try to get over on the employees. Also, you know the setup when you are offered the job and take it. Big places aren't going to change their wage packages out of the blue like that. The closest I've seen to places not paying overtime are places that pay every two weeks and you get 8/80 overtime. That means they pay overtime for anything past 8 hours in a row or 80 hours in two weeks. You could be scheduled the most ungodly hours and not be off for 14 days and still not get overtime. They tell you that up front. The hospital I worked at was like that, but it was fine with me. They had plenty of people there and the only time I was ever forced to work longer was during snowstorms (that's flurries, sleet, or possible icy roads down here, not actual snowstorms) when everybody had to come in and stay until it was over, but it was a hospital and you knew that going in. Some places pay OT only after 40 hours, which is what my husbands does and he gets paid once a week. He could work 16 hours for two days in a row and then one day of 8 hours and not have work the rest of the week and not get OT because it's 40 hours. Bigger contracting places have better money and benefits. They hire the best guys and so they have people trying to get on there. The company DH is at was big and a really good one with good benefits but it was sold and the guy who bought it is trying to build it back up because construction down here ground to a halt before the last election and he had to cut back and hire through temp agencies to make ends meet. They can't afford to offer insurance now, or a company truck, or retirement or anything like that. They pay him a good wage and they pay overtime and you get a Christmas bonus and a Thanksgiving turkey. That's about right down here for a middle size contractor.

Anyway, I tried to cover everything I can think of about OT and stuff. My experiences may be different than yours, so I thought I would go over everything I thought of that you might mean. However, I don't have a problem with people having to work more for less money than those who have been doing it longer, thats just incentive. I seriously don't think anybody would ever introduce any bill or anything like that to cut out paying overtime. That would be wonderful for businesses if they passed it, but you have more workers voting than you do owners, and just introducing it would kill you for sure. You couldn't get elected if you were the only one running after that! So, I know about you being in the military but I don't remember what you told me about your other work experiences so I don't remember if you did blue collar work or white collar work or artist type work or were on disability after the military or what, and also you are in a completely different part of the country than I am and of course things are different everywhere, so I was wondering what gave you the impression that this is going to end up like The Ten Commandments (the good version with Charlton Heston) with the govt as Pharo, the business owners as Edward G Robinson clones and us as the Hebrew slaves. Remember too please that I haven't watched the news since my mother died last year because we only have Netflix and we rarely get the paper and I hate reading it online, I want to see the local news at 5 and the national news at 6 on tv, the way I like it lol so I may have missed other things similar to this, but if it was something that would effect blue collar people my husband would have been screaming his head off about it, he listens to NPR and talk radio all the time at work and in the car, and he doesn't mind reading it online too so he's up to date. For real, I'm wondering what makes you think they are going to force the hours and are going to stop paying overtime. I'm not asking that in my smarmy sarcastic challenging way I sometimes do, I'm sincerely asking because you are a friend and while we may not agree on things sometimes I can usually see where you are coming from and where you got the idea, but I don't this time so I'm asking.

Honestly, overtime isn't the working man's bane, it's his best friend. And I guarantee you if there was a switch to all salary, guys would be walking out left and right, especially the blue collar guys, most of them will put something on the line to make a stand for something they believe is important, and this certainly would be. So please give me a little background on why you think it's going like this, I really want to understand and I don't.

"Bloodsucking capitalist"......
Spoken like a true have-not.

I appreciate your kindness and patience and willingness to engage me my experience was not a good one, in that in the early 80s I had a series of mcjobs that did not pay overtime, they were the only things I could get because I am slow. after the last one I was homeless. during the Reagan recession the only ones hiring working-class types was uncle sam's army [air force wouldn't take me because I wasn't smart/fast enough for them, same for navy/cg, forget about the marines, also medical/psychiatric waivers]. by all rights the army should not have accepted me either but they were hard up and it was their decision that I went along with because 3 colds [beans and franks on paper plates most of the time] and a cot beat the burlap out of being out on the street. so I experienced being cheated like this [not being paid and such] and am not just imagining it. and every time I read about some hypocrite politician putting forth some disenfranchisement such as in Wisconsin [union busting, days-off elimination] it is like ripping the scab off an old wound. and every time I hear some self-righteous right-wing yuppie type saying "just jerk yourself up by your own bootstraps," that is just cold-blooded salt-rubbing along the lines of marie Antoinette. THIS is the reason I posted this newsoid item.

Ah ok. I figured you had a reason instead of just a knee jerk reaction because it sounded like it might be bad, or something. Thanks for telling me. I'm sorry you had bad experiences, I really am. I like you and think you are pretty smart and nice and you seem normal to me, but you might have issues that show up at a job and I do understand that. I do have a rebuttal though, to why your situation wasn't the normal one. I'm not dismissing it or saying your situation didn't matter, cause it did. However it's not the usual situation for the majority of blue collar workers who will be effected by this bill.

McDonalds was and is bad about hiring teenagers or people who can't get jobs elsewhere and paying them crap and working them s**t hours. If you were an asst mngr there then I do understand the salary thing and the bunch of hours because it's like "paying your dues" and learning it from the bottom before you prove you are interested and capable and get promoted to manager. I don't know if they still do that there, but I really dont think they could legally get away with paying the minimum wage people straight time and not overtime when they work over 40 hours. The idea of paying assistant managers salary and working the s**t out of them isn't a nice idea and I think it's a bit much just to manage a McDonalds, but they do that kind of thing with doctors too you know, so the idea of putting in your time and proving you want it is a valid one for a job, because I'm sure other really much better paying jobs do it as well but it doesn't seem as crappy because it's better paying and not at a hamburger joint. Lawyers have to put in a lot of time and not get a lot for it at first from what I've read too. Again, not the same thing and I think McDonald's got a little too big for it's britches in using that idea because being a manager of the place isn't really worth going through a lot of hours for not a lot of money and the crap for so long. Maybe they stopped it by now, I don't know. But the kids at the registers and in the kitchen get overtime if they are required to work it I'm sure, although they also probably have a lot of part time people so they dont have to pay it. You got caught in a bad situation over and over, and during that time period stuff wasn't really a tightly regulated as it is now.

Military is a whole different story and you know my feelings on that. But it was their loss and I ended up with my great kids and I wouldn't have had those kids if I was on the other side of the world and didn't marry DH. It would have been great I think, because I know some people hate that kind of thing, I love it. Hardship because I'm broke really sucks ass, but hardship, working my ass off, going through hell for a reason and a cause is something I can really get behind. I know, it's weird but that's just me. You know more about it than I'm explaining here, but you get me on this. It just wasn't for you. Not at all. It's not for some people. Others, like my friend I told you about just thrive on it for different reasons. Hers were different than mine would have been but some just aren't meant for it. DH went down to MEPS with me to enlist but got PDQ'd too and he would have really sucked at it there. He would have been able to do the physical stuff but he's not great at taking orders without being given an explanation of why etc, and you know as well as I do that wouldn't happen. I think they have tightened up on how they treat people as well, in some respects but not in others. I've heard some great stories about it and some not so great but the people I know who are in it now just love it. Mostly dudes but a few girls too.

So, I really do get how you just felt it was a government sanctioned continuation of what happened to you, but it isn't. I know you aren't a communist or anything and not as over the edge about things as some may think you are because of some opinions you have, but then I'm also not as hardhearted, cold, and bitchy as mine would make me seem either, I hope But I do get what you feel and I really promise you, without knowing anything about Wisconsin politics, that it's not going to force them to work those hours without overtime. That would cause a huge public outcry and wouldn't even get out of the briefcase. While you may feel that you are margenalized and were taken advantage of and not given a fighting chance, that might be the case. It really might be true that you got a shorter end of the stick than other people did, and that isn't right but it does happen. I don't want it to and it wasn't right but the majority of the workers in this country don't have that kind of experience.

I also have a theory about why the US is so big on "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "take care of your self and your own" and "sink or swim" mentalities, but I won't go into them on here in this thread. If you are interested in hearing it, let me know because I'll be on FB later on and I'll explain it to you there. I think it's a pretty good estimation of how it evolved like that. So, hit me up in the inbox later on if you want to hear it. I'd like to know what you think about it too, cause it seems pretty plausible to me.

All I see is rolling back a cumbersome regulation, having to file paperwork with the state just to work extra days is silly at best. I've done 7 day schedules before, and it's always been either something I knew about going in, such as a contract software job, or a temporary measure caused by someone quitting or getting fired, and in every case I've been compensated accordingly, which has been nice as many of these times have been during the holidays when I could use the money. Last time, I was actually consulted first as we had a problem employee that my boss wanted out now but she wanted to make sure that I was okay with the hours first, and she refused to take a day off herself until I took one first, which is a great management move as it's hard to complain about your hours when your boss is right there doing more.

Well, maybe next time those blue collar guys who don't appreciate what liberalism has done for them will reconsider voting for the candidate with the R with his name.
My dad, who had been a union man, not long before he retired during the Reagan years, had been crestfallen at how the other working class guys he had worked with were ready to throw the Dems over for Ronny Raygun. My dad was never a great believer in the mental capacity of the average joe - a point I used to argue with him. Since then, I think I see what he meant.

IMHO, soon there will be no "next time" if the PTB have their way.

Hopefully, it'll never come to that.

^^^
I hope your wishes for the best come true. but so far all my worst fears about this country's backwards slide are coming true in spades. I never would have imagined that racism would come out in the open like it has again, after all the sacrifices of the civil rights movement in the 60s, it is like all their heroic efforts were for naught and/or their noble accomplishments are slowly/inexorably being undone.

The fight against the forces of reaction is never ending. The thing is, they think they're right - but the difference is, when we say we are, we're right.

these days I believe mankind is generally in an atavistic mood. buckle your seat belts, the ride is only gonna get rougher and where we're going there won't be any roads.

Are you trying so say that the Georgia peanut farmer was a better president? Many democrats of that era would disagree, hence the term "Reagan Democrat".
Hell, my old man was a democrat but I think even he grudgingly admitted to voting for Reagan.
But then again you thought that buffoon LBJ, who made a mess out of US involvement in Vietnam and drove the south republican, was a good president.
I guess I rest my case....

LBJ was a tragic figure with a lot of skeletons in his closet. he truly was one with an angel over one shoulder and a demon over the other. sad. what could have been...