[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:05] Speaker B: You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit [email protected] and now here's your host, Leister. [00:00:21] Speaker A: A very good afternoon or evening to you if you're listening to this in the afternoon or evening. If you're listening in the morning. Good morning. I am recording in the evening. A lot's going on in my world. For those that care, a lot's going on. My renovations are proceeding, albeit slowly. We're in hot weather. Hot weather that of course degrades my physical. It's not for me. No. I've always been one that was cold. I could, I could tolerate the heat when I was younger, but I can't anymore. Now I can and I, I can barely tolerate, tolerate the cold. Not like I used to. That's a long story. Today I'm going to be spending the vast majority of the episode. There's a couple things. First, I'll do a quick as I record this, they are doing the Diddy verdict and apparently they're struggling on the rico, surprise, surprise charge. And they're telling the jury to go back out and deliberate some more because you know, that's how the feds do. They try to get you on trumped up charges. So the lesser charges that are a slam dunk because they're a slam dunk, most of them are the sexual assault. The, the, there's a charge about restraining somebody with intent to sex. There's all these that they're like slam dunk. He's on video doing a lot of them and they would have gotten scot free on those. But it would have been enough time because you figure, you know, somewhere like 10 years, five years they wanted to throw the book at the guy and send a message. And the RICO to me, that was just not something they're going to prove. I don't think they're going to prove that. So I think and the way the law reads in this situation is that if they can't get all five, it's going to be a mistrial. Which that's the reason they shouldn't trump up the charges. Go with what you can get, do something because all you're doing when you trump up the charges is you're allowing whatever crimes he did do to kind of go under the table and then the victims don't get closure. I don't think Cassie is a victim outside of what we saw in the video. You know, the freak offs. And I don't believe this idea that he forced her to do those. I believe she was a willing participant through a lot of it. And then due to the abuse that we know happened right then, I think she started to regret being involved but then got into kind of this trapped situation. So I'm saying that there were certain people that spoke out and said no. She was a willing participate in a lot of it. She made the calls and a lot of it. He didn't force a lot of it. And I think eventually it became, okay, I don't want to do this anymore. That's a different conversation. Regardless, it looks like, at least on the surface there's no evidence, but it looks like on the surface that because they trumped up the charges and they knew they were not going to prove a RICO case, that it's possible there'll be a mistrial or Diddy. We don't know yet. That's as I record it. So that's on the side. And the other piece that I'm going to talk about has to do with. There was an. There was a journal, peer reviewed journal by the University of South Florida and Bowling Green University. So this journal, I did a comment on it elsewhere and I had somebody who apparently maybe a listener, I'm not sure, but they asked the question. Okay. Because I in my response, the journal has to do with sick leave and how companies are impacted when employees don't take their proper sick leave. And you're thinking as a worker, well, no. Is the company impacted if I do take sick leave? They're impacted both ways. A lot of it's in their control, but they are impacted both ways. But the impact for employees not taking sick leave, it's subtle. But what they're saying is if the employees don't take sick leave because they don't feel like they can, you know, because they'll threaten being fired or they have a strong work ethic. You know, I have a strong work ethic. You know, my whole thing is like with my client, I've not taken. And I'm a contractor, right? But I've not taken any sick day off. I've not taken any day off at all. Even when I was, you know, struggling with shingles, I still showed up every day just because that's my culture. The work has to be done. I'm currently the only one that can do it. And they're in. Their hiring process is incompetent. So they're not able to get the right people to offload it that is part of the problem. Companies don't understand they have to hire and they have to staff more than one person for every job because you always need to have a backup. They don't want to hire a backup. So usually you'll have a lot of these jobs where there's just one person doing the work or one person competent enough to do the work. Then if they try to draft in somebody who's not competent, all heck breaks loose. And then this person who's expert the get saddled with it when they come back. Or there's these subtle mentions about, you know, not taking time off and all this. That creates kind of this pressure to constantly show up. When companies give that impression that they're not allowed to take time off or that they shouldn't, the negative comes because they have a. In their mind, they don't. They don't like their company, they don't trust their company. They don't believe their company's got their back. They think they're being treated like a number. That's all true. So when they're talking about an impact to the business, they're saying that you've, you've harmed sentiment with your employees when you do that, which is absolutely the case. You're harming sentiment when you do that. So I'm, I'm on this vein. I'm saying, well, yeah, that's exactly what it is. You can't just do that. You can't just mistreat your workers. I might be in the culture that feels like I'm just going to show up and work through it, but I also feel that you should be able to take time off when you need to. You're not going to be able to do that as long as companies abuse the workers and treat them like numbers. And I pointed out two specific. At least this is the United States. Two specific areas that needed improvement. And this person was asking, well, what would you do about it? I'm going to talk about one of them more than the other one. But suffice to say, there are two primary reasons why this got so bad about the whole sick league. One of them is FLSA exemption. If you don't know what FLSA exemption is, don't worry about it. It's a fancy term for rules that were written a long time ago that govern how people are paid and how time is tracked. That's the simple answer. Think of it this way. If you're white collar, you are FLSA exempt. If you're blue collar, you. You are not exempt. And this goes to whether you're exempt from getting hourly money and overtime. Some people are, some people are not. And so if you're. Most people are white collar that might be listening to the show, there might be some blue collar folks, but most are probably white collar. And so you understand when I describe the lack of overtime, the other one is at will employment. Everybody knows that one. And I'm referring to the employer side of at will employment. But suffice to say at will employment is the idea, and it doesn't apply in every state, but the vast majority have adopted it. But it's this idea that you can leave as an employee. You can leave whenever you feel like it. You do not have to give notice. They tell you that. Don't burn your bridges and all that. I would argue that if you are in a abusive relationship with your employer, you should leave at your own whim whenever you feel like it's. And you do not have to give notice. It's your discretion. The employer then can basically fire you at any time for any. And there's laws that say that you, if you're in a protected class, for example, that you have protections. And the truth is those protections are kind of, because they're not really enforced. So the idea of at will employment was founded in the principle that you should have. You're not locked in. There's not a contract or some are in contracts. But even as a contractor, you can be terminated anytime. The idea was flexibility and freedom to shift as your demands and your needs change, whether you're the employer or you're the employee. That was a thought to me. I think it's worse on the FLSA exemption side. That's why I'm going to spend more time on that one. But if you think about at will employment, one thing I've always said is the employer should be required to prove that cutting that person is worse than keeping them. There should be a standard that they're tested before they're allowed to let that person go. Now you can put them on paid leave. Let's say that there's some kind of an issue or risk or something else. If it turns out that due to the investigation, due to the knowledge it turns out that person, let's say, was sexually harassing somebody or they were doing threats or something, that's an imminent danger. Imminent risk, absolutely. You can cut them right away. I'm talking about where during this period, okay, well, we chose to cut this person because we're leaping all in on AI and so we need Less humans. To me, that's not a good enough case to cut somebody in two weeks notice just because you chose to go all in on computers and you're basically screwing the humans. Because you got to think about the downstream impacts from a tax revenue perspective. You got to think about the sentiment impact for companies. You got to think about the impacts on different services like Medicaid and SNAP and all of these assistance programs that are burdened when the employers don't take care of the employees. Health care system gets taxed because those people can no longer afford health care. And so then there's a strain, the credit gets jacked up. Everything has a domino effect when the employers don't take care of their workers. So if it's a fickle reason, then no, I don't agree with it. But flsa exempt, that's the worst. That's what I'm going to spend the rest of this on. FLSA example, you're white collar. Specifically, I'm going to target the computer profession because that's the worst offender. Some may not know this is the question. Some may not know the history behind where that came from. The computer profession exemption basically said at the time all of these companies came together and said it's too difficult to track time by hours. So it's not, it's not effective for us to pay hourly because we can't track their time by hour. They can work any other time. It's too much of a challenge. So they created this exemption that negates them having to pay overtime. Anybody that's worked in it, which fits you in the computer profession understands the concept and you've heard the concept of on call, right? The idea that they can basically have you violate 24 hours of your day just in case something goes south with some tool somewhere and you're not paid for that extra time. Now on the blue collar side, you're paid overtime time and a half. You're paid holiday time at two times. You get none of that in the computer exemption. And again, the only reason that became a thing is because they told the government, we, it's not enough. We can't track these hours. It's too hard. Anybody that's worked in it already understands that you fill out a timesheet all the time. You fill out a timesheet where they force you to make sure it equals 40 hours. You fill out a timesheet with every single hour that you actually work. You fill out a timesheet sometimes explaining what you're doing. And they always try to constrain you to 40 hours, even if you might work 50 or 60. Think about it. You're always required to fill out timesheets. They always could do tracking on timesheets. The excuse they gave back then was a lie and we've never revisited it. To say you guys are scamming the system because you obviously can track the time. So since you can track the time and since you're mandating the tracking of the time, no, you do not get this exemption anymore. You will pay overtime for those people who are on call. And the reg should say if you're doing on call, you will pay that worker 24 hours of pay for every single day that you require on call. Either that or you're required to pay double payment for every hour beyond eight. Some way to fairly compensate the people that are basically losing their lives. And I don't mean literally, I mean they're losing their livelihoods because they're having to do this on call nonsense. And a lot of times you're not doing anything, you just have to be available. But that effect, if you have kids, if you have a relationship that affects you, that impacts you, affects your health because you're not able to sleep effectively, you woke up in the middle of the night. I remember the old days when it's pagers. You're woken up in the middle of the night and some server crashed. And because you're a 24, 7 operation, you got to get up and you're the one on call. You got to log into the computer and you got to scramble to get something fixed. Your brain's foggy. It's an ineffective science, but they do it because there's 24 hour services that you as a consumer need to have available. I'm not negating the value of doing it. I'm saying that companies have never taken the time to implement new technologies that are designed to self heal, steal those texts. So they still fall back on this idea of on call, which is an archaic thing except for hardware. Hardware is the only place where on call makes sense. We're not in a hardware world anywhere near because we're using those services like say cloud services. In the software world, it's unheard of, frankly, in my opinion, to do excessive on call. But if we are going to do it, I just want those people to get fairly compensated. And again, my vote is you will pay them 24 hours of pay for every day that you put them on call. So some people, they're on call every day. Okay, you're going to keep booking 24 hours of pay and you're required to pay them 24 hours. Couple that with the at will employment, we need to revisit it and say you're not allowed to cut that person simply because you don't want to pay. You can need to figure out how you do not put that person on our call, figure out how to do it, implement technologies, implement other ways to where you don't need the people on call and then you don't have to pay it. But as long as you want humans to do it, you will pay them 24 and you will not fire them or lay them off simply because you don't want to do that. Because of the FLSA exempt business and how we got the at will employment business and all these things that are to the detriment of the worker, it can trigger you to be sick more than you should because it's harmful to your body. Both of these are harmful to your body. They're harmful to you when you're stressed, when you're under this pressure, when you're under these things, you have a tendency to get sick more often. You don't realize it. My point is, and to the response of the question, we fix it easy. The Atwell employment is they have to prove that dropping that person, keeping that person is worse than dropping them. They got to prove that and there has to be a burden of proof. They need a month's notice paid. So you make it easy on the worker and lessen the impact on the system on the way down. With respect to FLSA exempt, I think they should need, they need exceptions to the rule. If you're going to require a timesheet, you are required to pay overtime to them or drop the timesheets. There should be no timesheets. If you do a timesheet, you are required to pay overtime and that's the exception. So you choose, you get rid of your timesheets or you pay them overtime. It's that simple. I guarantee you the vast majority of companies are dropping those timesheets like a rock because they don't do any good because people lie on them anyway. It doesn't help them manage the work they think it does. But all it's doing is allowing them to see how much money did they save by not paying you the overtime when they abuse you with on call. All I'm suggesting is that the whole sick thing is a valid thing and it's a valid concern and it's not going to get any better unless we solve these two problems that are contributing to the reason why people get sick. Until we're willing to do that, it's still going to be the. I almost cussed. It's still going to be the problem that it always has been. It's not going to get any better. And that's a sad state for people. And I feel bad that that's a. That that's a reality. Even now, as somebody who has been abused and the white collar FLSA exemption for years, I feel really bad about it. I'm not now because I own my own business, but when I was. It sucks. And I understand. And I wish our government had the stones to step up and fix what's been broken for so long.