Getty
Everybody knows that office politics suck. Experts agree that they decrease productivity, and in many ways, can contribute to a hostile workplace. Unfortunately, all companies have some version of them, and they come in many forms. Whether it be the deceptively harmless gossip to the more overt displays of favoritism and hostile takedowns — you can’t avoid them forever. The best thing to do is to learn how to navigate around them. Here are four ways to find your way without getting tangled up in messy office politics.….Story continues…
By: Sho Dewan
Source: 4 Ways To Avoid Toxic Workplace Politics
.
Critics:
Many professional workers put in longer hours than the forty-hour standard. In professional industries like investment banking and large law firms, a forty-hour workweek is considered inadequate and may result in job loss or failure to be promoted. Medical residents in the United States routinely work long hours as part of their training.
Workweek policies are not uniform in the U.S. Many compensation arrangements are legal, and three of the most common are wage, commission, and salary payment schemes. Wage earners are compensated on a per-hour basis, whereas salaried workers are compensated on a per-week or per-job basis, and commission workers get paid according to how much they produce or sell.
Under most circumstances, wage earners and lower-level employees may be legally required by an employer to work more than forty hours in a week; however, they are paid extra for the additional work. Many salaried workers and commission-paid sales staff are not covered by overtime laws. These are generally called “exempt” positions, because they are exempt from federal and state laws that mandate extra pay for extra time worked.
The rules are complex, but generally exempt workers are executives, professionals, or sales staff. For example, school teachers are not paid extra for working extra hours. Business owners and independent contractors are considered self-employed, and none of these laws apply to them.
Generally, workers are paid time-and-a-half, or 1.5 times the worker’s base wage, for each hour of work past forty. California also applies this rule to work in excess of eight hours per day, but exemptions and exceptions significantly limit the applicability of this law.
In some states, firms are required to pay double-time, or twice the base rate, for each hour of work past 60, or each hour of work past 12 in one day in California, also subject to numerous exemptions and exceptions. This provides an incentive for companies to limit working time, but makes these additional hours more desirable for the worker. It is not uncommon for overtime hours to be accepted voluntarily by wage-earning workers.
Unions often treat overtime as a desirable commodity when negotiating how these opportunities shall be partitioned among union members. Yip Siu-fai, Professor of the Department of Social Work and Social Administration of HKU, has noted that professions such as nursing and accountancy have long working hours and that this may affect people’s social life.
He believes that standard working hours could help to give Hong Kong more family-friendly workplaces and to increase fertility rates.Randy Chiu, Professor of the Department of Management of HKBU, has said that introducing standard working hours could avoid excessively long working hours of employees.
He also said that nowadays Hong Kong attains almost full employment, has a high rental price and severe inflation, recently implemented minimum wage, and is affected by a gloomy global economy; he also mentioned that comprehensive considerations on macroeconomic situations are needed, and emphasized that it is perhaps inappropriate to adopt working-time regulation as exemplified in other countries to Hong Kong.
Lee Shu-Kam, Associate Professor of the Department of Economics and Finance of HKSYU, believes that standard working hours cannot deliver “work–life balance”. He referenced the research to the US by the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999 and pointed out that in the industries and regions in which the wage elasticity is low, the effects of standard working hours on lowering actual working time and increasing wages is limited:
For regions where the labor supply is inadequate, standard working hours can protect employees’ benefits yet cause unemployment; but for regions (such as Japan) where the problem does not exist, standard working hours would only lead to unemployment.
In addition, he said the effect of standard working hours is similar to that of (for example) giving overtime pay, making employees to favor overtime work more. In this sense, introducing standard working hours does not match its principle: to shorten work time and to increase the recreation time of employees. He believed that the key point is to help employees to achieve work–life balance and to get a win-win situation of employers and employees.
Francis Lui, Head and Professor of the Department of Economics of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, believed that standard working hours may not lower work time but increase unemployment. He used Japan as an example to illustrate that the implementation of standard working hours lowered productivity per head and demotivated the economy.
He also said that even if the standard working hours can shorten employees’ weekly working hours, they may need to work for more years to earn sufficient amount of money for retirement, i.e. delay their retirement age. The total working time over the course of a lifetime may not change. In 2012, Lok-sang Ho, Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Public Policy Studies of Lingnan University, pointed out that “as different employees perform various jobs and under different degrees of pressures.
It may not be appropriate to establish standard working hours in Hong Kong”; and he proposed a 50-hour maximum work week to protect workers’ health.
Report: Life Is Strange Devs Dealt With Toxic Workplace, Crunch
Leave a Reply