[harryh]

However, from an employee perspective, paid overtime is great. It lets you be lazy in your work. You have no incentive to help the company finish it's tasks in 40 hours when you know they are going to pay you to stay 55 hours to complete it by brute force.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that there are two sides to incentives and it's not obvious that one side is more important than the other.

[chipgap98]

Quality of life is one big reason not to work 55 hours a week. Even for additional compensation, I wouldn't want to be stuck at my job for all that additional time.

Also overtime does not mean that you can just stay late at work whenever you want and bill your employer. Overtime is for when the company tells an an employee that the employee has to stay late to finish an assignment. Then the employee is compensated for staying late, rather than being told they have to stay late and having to just deal with it.

[joesmo]

There are a ton of incentives to not work the 55-hour week as an employee even when it's paid 1.5 or 2x. Health and having time to do other things are probably near the top of the list, but there are many others like morale, avoiding fatigue/burnout etc. Having a cap on hours worked and forcing employers to pay for extra hours, even if it's at the same rate as regular hours, works incredibly well in practice. Not having such a cap and not paying for extra hours doesn't. Inevitably, at the very least, the work will suffer greatly, probably to the point where the extra hours become meaningless compared to what the workers could achieve if they were not overworked.

[harryh]

Empirically employees who get paid 1.5x or 2x for overtime seem to want to get as much overtime as possible regardless of the fact that it cuts into other activities in their lives. That's at least been my perspective. I'm not sure if there are any large scale studies done on this topic.

You might be correct that the best way to balance the competing incentives is to require overtime pay but not at a higher rate.

[Retric]

In large part that relates to the low pay of anyone that still qualifies for Overtime in the US. But also because it's calculated on a week by week basis. Work 60 hours in one week with double over time and you get to take 1 full week off. Change that to a monthly or yearly basis and people are less inclined to work overtime.

[walshemj]

This should have not been down voted for non professional jobs there are a lot of "Spanish" practices around OT and Bonus's

the posties used to put some of the post posted on Friday to make sure that there was OT avable on Saturday.

And even in professional jobs I have seen some sketchy practices ie DBA's being on call 4 in 4 and getting called maybe twice a year BTW the rate was $600+ per week plus toil at OT rates

[intended]

At which point you get fired.

If you consistently can't meet deadlines and your boss isn't helping then people lose jobs.

There's - always - some variant of these laws, and all states have people who can abuse it.

For many jobs though, over time should be there, because many jobs have only a finite amount of output achievable by a human being.

[maerF0x0]

The employer holds a myriad of cards to deal with unproductive people. At will employment means they can lose that will at any sign of unproductive work. Outside of tech, and IMO, its much harder to replace a job than it is to replace an employee, so the scales are tipped in the employer's favor.