California IT Professionals Stuck Between Two Worlds

El Sobrante, CAYou work long hours, often in a small space, and have no authority over your job or what you do. You are considered a professional and are required to be on-call and work overtime without extra pay. Although your salary sounds impressive, when it is stretched over all the hours you work it turns out you barely make more than minimum wage. You are a California IT professional, one who has been misclassified as exempt from overtime pay. Now you are considering an overtime lawsuit against your employer, claiming you should have been paid overtime for all the years you worked for the company.

Who can blame you? After all, minimum wage workers fight back when they are not paid properly for their overtime work. Of course, your case is a little more complex. You not only have to show that you did, indeed, work the overtime hours, you also have to show that you were misclassified as exempt from overtime pay. That can be a bit difficult.

The rules regarding overtime exemption are somewhat subjective. For example, someone who is exempt from overtime pay must be able to show discretion and independent authority in his or her job. But the law does not state what that discretion is. Some software workers have no discretion in their job: their every move is dictated by the higher-ups in the company. Other workers have a lot of discretion and get to determine the hours they work, the jobs they work on and how they go about completing their tasks.

However, many software workers fall somewhere in between the 2 categories. They have a bit of discretion—perhaps they can determine the order of the tasks they complete—but they are still at the mercy of their bosses when it comes to the important decisions. These workers are stuck between 2 extremes, but they are left without any of the benefits of either. They do not get the overtime pay that workers without discretion get but they also do not have the true authority that those exempt from overtime pay should have.

They may have a fancy job title, such as Senior Program Analyst, but in reality the title means very little. As a Senior Program Analyst, they still carry out the same tasks as the Program Analyst, who happens to receive overtime pay. However, they do not have the same power or authority that other management in the company has, despite the addition of "Senior" to their job title. Again, they are stuck between 2 worlds, the worlds of employees and management, with none of the advantages of either world but with many of the disadvantages.

Does this sound familiar to you? They call you a "Senior" employee but still expect you to work many overtime shifts and be on-call regularly—and you have no choice. Your life revolves around your employer, but you are not properly compensated for this. You work many more hours than you did before they added "Senior" to your job title but without additional compensation. You thought when you got that job title that things would be better for you, but the word "Senior" has only made life more difficult—because when "Senior" came along, away went your overtime pay.

Of course, what they did not tell you when they gave you the title "Senior" was that just changing your job title does not mean that you are no longer eligible for overtime pay. Your job title is not the only thing that determines whether or not you get overtime—there are other factors, such as job description and discretion exercised in your duties, that come into play when determining overtime eligibility. They would not tell you that because they are trying to save money and they cannot save money if they are paying you for overtime.

But the truth is that if you are working overtime and not being paid for it, you might want to look into whether or not you have been misclassified as exempt from overtime pay. Because if you have been misclassified, there is a chance you could be compensated for all those extra hours you worked—and that money could probably come in handy right about now.