Exempt status

Been mainly lurking around these forums, specifically WGU threads since I'm strongly considering attending in a few months. I plan to be more active on here

I just wanted to see if I could get other opinions on my situation. I have been working at the same company as a NOC Tech for over 4 year now although it has been indirectly. So far it has been with 2 different contracting agencies and now for over a year, it has been with an outsourced company. With the two contracting agencies I was a regular hourly employee with overtime. Now that it is outsourced, we are "exempt" from OT and paid salary. I'll add that I took a significant pay cut just so I wouldn't be unemployed. I have looked at the labor laws and I believe that we don't meet the requirements to be exempt although it is a bit wordy. http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWCArticle4.pdf (1.3 Professional Exemption) Our main job description would be monitoring systems, racking/unrack servers, cabling, password changes, patching, reports etc. We work a set schedule as well.

A few of us have filed a claim with the labor board and are still waiting to hear back but thought I would see if anyone has similar experiences/thoughts. I know I need to find another job for other reasons, like becoming stagnant, but I think getting my degree first would be better off. Hopefully it can open my eyes to what path I want to head into.

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Comments

ptilsen

This is what you should reference:
elaws - Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor

It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as its within the guidelines of "Computer professional" and you make more than $27.63/hr. If you do not make $27.63/hr (I believe this assumes your salary averaged over a 40-hour work week) and do not have staff reporting to you then you are probably not able to be qualified as exempt.

We are going through this ourselves and are about to switch a bunch of employees to hourly non-exempt as a result. In my opinion, it is extremely common to erroneously (illegally) pay IT professionals in particular as exempt employees, although I have seen it in other lines of work as well. IANAL and YMMV, but I would definitely contact the state's labor department and/or a lawyer.

It is very easy for employers to take advantage of employees in this manner both unwittingly (the law is a bit convoluted) and maliciously, simply because most people do not realize that the laws on who can be exempt are actually fairly strict and because there is a misguided prestige to salaried positions, in many minds.

Drovor

Thank you for the link! Actually I make quite a bit less than $27.63/hr and do not have anyone reporting to me.

To me, I always thought to be exempt in IT you either had to be in management, administrator, programmer or engineer type role. The company I work for use an over the top job title for us. I would say the accurate title is NOC Technician but they go as far as to call us a "lead infrastructure engineer 4". Which I think is their way of trying to justify using the exempt tag although job title doesn't have anything to do with it.

Basically they under bid for the contract and try to make up for it by shafting the employees.

ptilsen

Drovor wrote: »

To me, I always thought to be exempt in IT you either had to be in management, administrator, programmer or engineer type role. The company I work for use an over the top job title for us. I would say the accurate title is NOC Technician but they go as far as to call us a "lead infrastructure engineer 4". Which I think is their way of trying to justify using the exempt tag although job title doesn't have anything to do with it.

Your thoughts were largely correct and your assertion that they are using the job title to appear to meet the definition of "Computer professional" is most likely accurate. You should probably be paid on an hourly non-exempt status, but almost certainly a non-exempt one.