Thursday, May 08, 2008
Reader: Cherry Hill OT case spurs new GCI policy
Gannett Blog's reporting on unpaid overtime at Cherry Hill seems to have struck a nerve, a reader says: "In addition to signing the usual annual 'Yes, I promise I'll be good' ethics policy document, this year employees also have to complete a 'wage and hour' class on the corporate virtual campus."
7 comments:
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while I was working at East Brunswick, NJ, in the production department, getting overtime was frowned upon. with the job I had, pretty much everything had to be done during the hours I worked, but I would also have to run in to take care of problems related to my specific skills (that no one was cross trained on in the building, what a shock!). but did I see any extra money or a bonus for my efforts? puhleezze! it's no wonder with salaries based on a Virginia cost of living scale, no overtime, no bonuses, that Gannett cannot attract or hold onto any real talent in their ranks.
ReplyDeletekeep up the great work, Gannett!
our hr rep (EB) sent out email directing all managers to take that wage and hour class. mandatory you say?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is Gannett is having all managers of a certain level attend the online wage and hour class...seems the mandate came out fairly recently...getting down to questions that mean so much and are so indicative of what really goes in a newsroom like "is a morning's commute included in hours worked?" come on, people...we're not talking about including commute time, the biggest problem lies in what happens to the employees who are made to be salaried and are then worked to death and berated because they're not working enough. In our newsroom, when one or two people quit, the editor will routinely turn one of the remaining employees into a "manager" - oddly enough with no real management duties...and with the new job comes the transformation over to a salaried position...and then that person picks up the workload of the other two people who left. Has happened at least five times in the past two years in our newsroom.
ReplyDeleteLost in Louisiana.
We've got more editors, section editors, multimedia editors and other made-up supervisor spots than I thought possible. I think one gal might be giving annual reviews to the coffee machine.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Supervisors & editors are salaried and exempt from overtime. And they are outside the union. Whatever money we lose on business cards for the newly promoted, we gain back in free slave labor in unpaid, unappreciated, (but expected) over-40-hour weeks.
You'd think a supposed media company could slap together a better product than the wage and hour program we got. Lousy sound, lousy visuals, lousy editing. ("I hear you laughing, Carol"?? Come on!)
ReplyDeleteIf this is supposed to stave off some labor relations board punishment, I suppose it fills that requirement. But why should we take any edict from corporate seriously... if they don't?
What with Web updates, press release rewrites and briefs gleaned from the Mom's discussion forum (A PTA dinner on Saturday!), my time card is the only outlet left for creative writing that got me in this gawdfersaken business in the first place.
ReplyDelete40 hours? What's that? The New Jersey work week has been 37.5 for as long as I can recall.
ReplyDeleteJim, can you look into other Gannett newsrooms and whether they are at 37.5 or 40? Why aren't they all the same?
And yes, the buyouts will mean the salaried managers get to add at least the equivalent of another workday to their hours each week to pick up the slack. Which is not to take away from the hourly folks, who will get reviewed poorly when they can't cover 100 towns for the flagship product while putting out 99 geo-sections while updating the web every 10 minutes while shooting and editing video while training to do podcasts.