"I was a chef/kitchen manager at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle and got paid a salary of $29,000 a year.
In exchange, I worked 60-90 hours every single week.”
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"I was a chef/kitchen manager at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle and got paid a salary of $29,000 a year.
In exchange, I worked 60-90 hours every single week.”
Read MoreThey try to make folks exempt so they don’t have to pay extra. The way everything works, there’s so much turnover in doing the job. So if I can’t fill a shift any other way, then I have to fill in the shift myself. The shift has to be filled. If one of my hourly staff does it, it’s overtime pay. If I do it, it’s free for the company. But it’s the same shift.
Read MoreWhen companies classify workers like me as "overtime exempt," they're basically getting free labor. There were days where I'd spend 14 hours at work instead of 10 because my night cook got sick. I ran through that restaurant like a hurricane, forgetting to take breaks, forgetting to eat even when there was food right in front of me. Someone had to pick up the slack, and since I was the manager, it fell to me. But it affected the entire staff — constantly working unpaid overtime put me at odds with my crew and made me a worse manager.
Read MoreWe urge the Department to establish an overtime exemption threshold calculated at three times the locally applicable minimum wage, which is approximately where the threshold was when our economy saw the most widely shared prosperity. This is the simplest, most transparent, and most appropriate way to reflect actual conditions in the job market. Pegging the threshold to this mark will benefit workers, employers, and the economy by providing workers more money to contribute to the economy, more time to invest in their communities, increased opportunity, higher productivity, and benefits to workplace health & safety.
Read MoreThe current national standard is wildly inadequate for Washington state workers, and we cannot wait for further federal action.
Read MoreOvertime pay after 40 hours of work first became a movement more than 100 years ago. But today it’s no longer a reality for hundreds of thousands of working people in our state. More and more of us are working more and more hours — but we're not getting paid for it.
Read MoreOvertime should be the default, not the exception: The single most important way employers signal a worker’s special Executive, Administrative, or Professional status is through the amount of money they pay them.
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