Imagine working at the same job for many years but new leadership comes in and makes a change the greatly impacts your take home pay. They decide that you’re now paid a salary instead of an hourly wage which means that you no longer get paid overtime.

Would you look for another job, stop working overtime, or try to get the company to reverse the decision?

In this story, one employee who travels quite a bit for work was really upset when his company made this exact decision. He wasn’t the only one who refused to work more than 40 hours a week, and it turns out that was just what needed to happen for management to understand their mistake.

Keep reading for all the details.

If you pay me for 40 hours you get 40 hours

I work a consulting engineer designing and implementing systems (network and server) upgrades for organizations with worldwide locations.

When initially hired by my company the agreement was I would get paid for every hour I worked, usually 40 hours a week when at the home site, up to 80+ hours per week when at the customer’s location.

No overtime, just straight time as my position is “exempt”.

While on-site I would also be paid MI&E (Lodging expenses, Mileage expenses, and Meal & Incidental Expenses) to include rental car. MI&E can add up to a couple thousand a week in places like Hawaii, Japan or England.

This doesn’t seem fair at all!

Flash forward a few years and the company has been bought and merged a couple of times and the new company decides that exempt employees are now salary and will not pay for any hours over 40 plus of course no discussion of negotiating a new rate due to the change in working conditions.

This reduces my annual compensation by over 20K per year as I would be at a customer’s site for 4-6 months a year.

I walk into the bosses office to discuss, he says nothing to discuss.

The company didn’t figure in the MI&E when they eliminated overtime.

Next time I am planning for a site, the plan is for me and my team to work 40 hours a week meaning an additional 3 weeks on site, neither the customer nor my boss were happy.

The additional three weeks added over 50K in MI&E to the estimate because it isn’t just me that does the work and the total number of chargeable hours is the same if we are on site 4 weeks or 7 weeks.

Sorry, if you only pay me for 40 hours I only work 40 hours.

A couple of VPs were quickly brought into the conversation and the new policy was quickly modified, when at a customer site we now get paid for every hour we work.

That worked out well! At least the company learned their lesson quickly.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person also refuses to work overtime.

Another person shares why they quit their job.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a researcher who complained about being excluded from a trip only to watch the university cancel the whole thing.

One person explains how it works at their job.

Yet another person also refused to work overtime.

Being on salary but expected to work overtime is a rip off. It’s great for the company but bad for the employee. I’m glad complying but refusing to work more than 40 hours helped the company in this story quickly realize their mistake.