change from hourly to salary

Camlan

The company I work for is thinking of changing its 4 managers (of which I am one) from hourly to salaried. In any normal company, we would have been salaried long ago, but this is a small (35 employee), family owned company and managers have only been in existence here for a few years and we all started as hourly. Frankly, all but one or two positions here would normally be classified as exempt, but the owners feel that their employees should be compensated for the extra hours they work. We are discussing this in a meeting this Friday. We have no other information about this.

I'm assuming the owners mean salaried exempt. This will definitely cause issues for two of the managers, who both average 15-20 hours a week of overtime. It won't affect me or the other manager very much.

Any suggestions as to what questions we need to ask or issues we need to raise at this meeting? We would like to a) sound as if we know what we are talking about and b) not agree to anything that would cause problems that we didn't foresee.

Thanks,
Cammy

Don D

Hourly or salaried doesn't seem to be the issue. A non-exempt position can be paid on a salary basis. If the company is trying to avoid the legitimate payment of overtime by misclassifying positions as exempt, which should not be, you should call their hand on it. They should be told that it has nothing to do with titling them managers or how long they've been there or not wanting to pay them overtime or wanting everybody to be paid in one manner. It boils down to a thorough analysis of the job's duties and responsibilities. This all may fall on deaf ears, depending on who has a 'seat' at the corporate table in this small, family owned business. Who among you has the cajones to go into the meeting and say, "I can tell you that this is not a legal application of the Fair Labor Standards Act"?