I’m curious, what’s the rule at your company for time/hours/being late etc.
At my company it works like this…
Everyone is salaried. That means their yearly income is decided. No overtime pay. No matter how much overtime you work you don’t get paid any. That’s normal. Same in America. Same in probably other countries too.
In the states, it’s illegal to dock salaried employees for missed hours(*). If you did it would effectively turn you into worse than an hourly employee because you can only get docked.
Work 8 hours, get 8 hours pay
Work 9 hours, get 8 hours pay
Work 7 hours, get 7 hours pay
Even then though you chould just choose never to work overtime and you’d never get shafted. It would be stupid because salaried is *supposed* to be better than hourly which it is if you can’t get docked but it’s worse if you do. It would also be a stupid policy because it makes employees think about it. “If the company is going to dock me for being a few minutes late then how do they expect me to give them any overtime for free?”
At my company they also have core hours. You are supposed to be in 10am to 3pm. Outside of that you are expected to work an average of 8 hours a day. In otherwords, today you could work 10am to 3pm. Tomorrow 8am to 9pm and that would be an average of 8 hours a day.
Many other companies I know also have core hours. The idea is to be flexible but also try to get people in the office at the same time for at least a few hours a day so meetings and other communication can happen.
The difference at my company if you are *late*, meaning you miss core hours, you get docked DOUBLE!!!!. That means, if you are 4 hours late, it doesn’t matter if you work 8 hour that day, 3 to 11 say, you get ZERO!!!.
Even if you are only late 2 hours for example you are still getting paid 1/2 your wages for the same amount of work. This to me seems like it might possibly be an actual crime even here in Japan.
What is the policy at your company?
Some references
- Hourly “Professionals”: a Fair Labor Trap for the Unwary Employer
- Fines climb for firms violating labor rules
- Can an employer and employee agree to waive overtime pay? (no!)
- How do employees prove damages? Do they have to keep their payroll records?
(short answer)if no records are kept it goes to the employee’s memory) - Computer Personnel Are Entitled to Overtime
- Discipline and Strict Work Scheduling Creates Overtime Liability For Alaska Employers
- Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, & Outside Sales Employees Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
…assuming that you’re talking about the same wage.
I am salaried and at my company (in the USA) the docking effect is in place as you described, except that I am docked from my allotted vacation time balance as opposed to being paid less in my check.
I wouldn’t really have a problem with this policy except that I sometimes get screwed with regard to overtime because I only get paid once a month.
My salary is based on the assumption that if you take 52 weeks in a year * 40 hours in a week you get 2080 hours. If you then divide 2080 hours by 12 months, you get 173.3333 hours a month.
If I work exactly 40 hours every week, everything is fine. But if I have 1 short week in the 4.3333 weeks that the payroll person happens to look at, I get screwed. It is not taken into consideration that I may have worked 55 hours the last week of the previous month, so I will lose some vacation time.
What sucks is that I don’t think this policy is necessarily screwing me on purpose, I think it is more a case of what’s easiest for the slightly incompetent and overwhelmed payroll person.
Needless to say, I track my hours *VERY CAREFULLY* in my PDA every single day!!
Some of my friends think this practice might be illegal, but I have been (too lazy / not sure where) to look up the answer…
When I was working in Japan for an international company, I was paid salary with unpaid overtime being the norm. I usually was in the office 10-13 hours/day. However time was very flexible with no concept of “docking” and I could take half a day off to go to the Ward office, for example, without having to officially take time off. And we’d often take 1 hour or longer lunches. So it was fairly relaxed.
Currently in the U.S. I’m a contractor. I am getting straight time, getting paid for all the hours I work. I can also take comp time without it coming out of my vacation time (ie work 9 hours Mon-Thur and work 4 hours on Friday).
Employees here are salaried and don’t get paid for overtime but they can take comp time and take time off for overtime hours worked.
Working in Asia one should forsee such bullshit. The Japanese business model is emulated in the region. Some do it well (South Korea – if you are a Korean, if you are a foreigner they fuck you any way they can and do it with a jingoistic pride), some do it poorly (Taiwan, where the salary men are in sorrier shape than Japan). Having worked in three countries in Asia I learned early on which countries and jobs offered better salaried positions over hourly positions (and vice versa). In Japan, I learned that if you are going to be salaried get the number of hours in the contract, i. e. the maximum. It was smooth sailing as I had 40 hours maximum and got paid well for basically doing 25 hours a week. When overtime came I sucked it up and realized I could be asked to work an addition fifteen hours a week. So be it. One month I worked 50 hours and got a bonus (some money, not a lot, but it was more than some folks get per-hour, part-timing, but my boss also treated me to a nice dinner with his family, and we shared some choice bottles of sake – so that was nice).
In Taiwan – hourly is the best. They’ll have you work until you die in salaried positions. They give year-end bonuses to locals but not foreigners, so why give so much of my time to companies that don’t treat me as well (even though I do the same work, if not more efficiently than my local peers - Taiwan has an efficiency problem, BIG TIME).
Congrats, Greg – you are not only adjusting to Japan with great language skills (I’m sincere about that compliment), but you are also living the Salary man’s life (hardly, but much more so than some expats there). At least it’s giving you insight. That’s priceless.
Keep survivin’.
Gregg, you are sometimes late 2 or 4 hours? If you often do this I would look at replacing you. If you have appointments that you mention like the day before, it should be comp time or time off. Most companies if you talk to them ahead of time will agree to one of these, even in Japan, unless they hate you already.
As Django said, get the max. hours written in a contract. And as much options as possible. Taiwan and China work 7 days a week 10-12 hours average and only take off for Chinese New Years- one week. They pay less too.
Bionic Roach, as I remember in the U.S, salaried workers can work up to 80 hours a week, before they are entitled to overtime by law. Most companies salary a worker and expect 50-70 hours a week. If they only wanted you to work 40 hours, they would have put you on hourly. On your computations, don’t they give you 2 weeks vacations with pay? or sick leave time?
I have been an owner of a business for 20 years in the U.S. I am now an independent contractor in Japan.
Gregg, you are a great source of information about Japan, keep it up!
The whole issue is a button for me. It’s actually why I quit my last job. I was 40 minutes late one day, the boss decided to chew me out even though (1) I had never missed a single deadline ever and (2) I had been 90 minutes early the day before. I quit on the spot.
No, generally I don’t come in late but once in a while it happens. I’d say once a week I’m 2 to 10 minutes late (for example if I wake up as normal but end up having to sit on the toilet longer than usual) and once a every month and a half I’m upto an hour late (forget to set the alarm for example) But, I always work MORE then the required amount of time.
You are wrong about US Law. Follow the links in the above if you don’t believe me. As is business owner you could be liable for lots of overtime. You’d be best to read up on it. The government believes has high as 80% of all employers in the US do not understand or are unaware the law. Hopefully you’ll find you are in compliance.
I noticed when I was in japan that my boss went balistic if I were late, but he also went balistic if we left on time, in other words we couldn’t leave the office before he did… so I started having 2 hour lunch breaks to compensate, these lunch breaks sometimes stretched out to 3 hours long!
Now, back in England, I’m on time every day and stay late on every project, its a bigger company than the one I was working for in tokyo but theres no drive to keep employees in late… we do it out of passion.
So I say to you, if you can get away with being late, do it! But be aware that it makes for a bad atmosphere with your co-workers
are all often late too so there is no bad atmosphere issue with them. But, They just except the punishment, getting their salary docked, even though most of them work 70 hours a week and the reason they are late is because there were here so late the day before. I can’t do that.
Also, I never said this was a Japanese company issue. The law may be different in Japan allowing them to do this stuff but I have friends at several competing Japanese companies that don’t have these childish rules.
Generally, I put in too much time at work. When there is no set time and no salary docking crap I’ve generally put in major overtime out of passion myself. In fact, sad as it is I’ve spent Christmas and New Years at work 4 or 5 times in my life even when I was back in America. But, as soon as a companies starts enacting asshole rules it sucks all the passion out of working for them.
In one situation, I had a boss who was pretty particular about coming in on time and he spoke to me about it a couple of times over the three years I worked there. Like being 15 to 30 minutes late mattered to him, so I chalked that down to a fairly “military” attitude. But at that company there wasn’t an insane work hour expectation. Certainly I saw leads staying late, but generally the company was pretty empty after 6pm.
Then, I worked for a company where the developers were fairly gung ho and were offered reasonable incentives (like royalties, duh). And I don’t remember anyone complaining about coming in late. At that company there were probably more people staying late, but still not the majority. It is easy to stay late when you like what you are doing of course. After working at that same company for many years, I ended up working on a game team where the lead programmer imposed his fanatical hourly work hours on the team and offered (but did not actually control) big benefits. In that case, the whole team tended to come in late and much of the team could be seen working past midnight. I left the company after that project for many reasons, but certainly one big reason was being irritated that the company did not reign in this kind of tyrannical behavior. I think in the end there was reasonable monetary compensation for the hard work, but did that really justify the stress in the end? I know I didn’t find it very appealing.
Then I had a similar experience with a company where almost everyone worked a pretty long day, and the incentives were reasonable again, but definitely not worth the stress in the end.
Then I worked in another country with a more European work ethic and realized that I automatically got more vacation time and companies were traditionally less stressful.
I feel sorry for anyone in a company working hard under high stress with lame compensation. I would recommend that anytime you are asked to work greater than 40 hours per week at a company on a regular basis, that you ask to have your incentives for doing so in writing. Then put together the WORST CASE scenario of hours worked and final compensation to see what you are getting per hour. If that sucks, then the only reason to work at that place is because you are working on exactly what you want to work on. Otherwise, Hasta La Vista, Baby!
One factor that can offset the stress is how “appreciated” that you feel. You can endure much more stress if you feel like you are seen as important and well respected. I have always been the happiest when that was the case. But many managers and employees are not great at spreading praise. When you work with people that are good at remembering your hard work, it really makes a work environment a better place.
when i wrote the ops manual, i had to consider the habits of Chinese people, and what i thought was decent company culture. Too loose and american, and things fall apart. Too tight and japanese and people get all bent out of shape. overtime gets overtime pay, but management tries to get everyone out of the door 30 minutes after closing time. there’s enough hours in the day to get work done, so overtime is frowned upon. weekends, serious crunch deadlines, or other special events, get refunded in extra time off, which have to be scheduled. do an extra 14 hrs last week. get a Friday plus half of Monday off when asked for. late people are docked 1:1, and are marked. the marks come into play at review time when considering a raise or promo. if you’re late all the time, chances are you won’t get a promotion. we’ll say, “how can you expect a manager salary when you’ve been late 20 times last quarter?” so far it’s working out well, but we’ve still got issues with people who are “sick” once a week, or have ”family isses” and take last minute time off during important projects. these are catch clauses in the taiwan labor law which really reduce productivity. we make all employees read the company manual on their first day of work, and encourage them to bring up questions or issues during their first week. better to solve a problem up front.