Q–My husband has worked 50 to 80 hours a week for three years in a job that has been considered “temporary.” Is this typical among salaried professionals?
A–Temporary employees are typically paid an hourly wage and receive overtime after 40 work hours per week. Because your husband is not classified as a full-time employee, he probably negotiated his salary and hours before accepting the position. The company probably hired and misclassified him as an independent contractor to keep from having to pay various taxes and employee benefits, though it would be subject to a fine if this were discovered in an Internal Revenue Service audit.
If your husband wants to know if he is being fairly compensated for the amount of hours he’s putting into the job, he should call an executive recruiter to see what type of jobs are available in his field. It’s a “seller’s market” right now, with companies and temporary agencies complaining that good employees are hard to find. So if he is unhappy, now is the time to make a move.
Q–I worked at a small nonprofit agency that was beset with a number of problems, including poor fiscal accounting practices and falsified grant reporting. I was an assistant to the executive director, who had been there for seven years. She came to the office only one day a week and instructed staff members to lie to the board of directors as to her whereabouts.
For six months, she allowed me to handle matters as I saw fit, and I was very successful. But she became threatened by my job performance and began to shrink my responsibilities, which I later found out was a pattern with her. She made my life so miserable I quit after one year. I spoke with a board member who said (the board) would monitor the director’s job performance. I am angry and feel I was penalized for doing a good job. How should I have handled the situation?
A–Don’t waste your energy on being angry. You did all you could, and you are probably not the first person in the director’s seven years to complain to the board about her behavior. The quote, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” carries an important lesson. You were right to bring the situation to the board’s attention, but once that’s done, it’s in their hands.
Saying they would monitor the director’s performance sounds like a brush-off that allows procrastination. An active solution would have been to hire an independent accounting firm to audit the books, to look into the high turnover by reading exit interviews and possibly re-interviewing ex-employees, and to ask you to stay (while protecting you in your job) until the board had hard evidence of the woman’s unprofessional and fraudulent activities.
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Write to Lindsey Novak, At Work, Financial Department, 4th Floor, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611, or, via e-mail: AtWorkbyLN@aol.com. No phone calls, please.
