For Harried Assistants, Overtime Rule
May Have Its Downside
By NOAM SCHEIBER MAY 30, 2016
For decades, bosses at publishing houses, glossy magazines, consulting firms,
advocacy groups, movie production companies and talent agencies have groomed
their assistants to be the next generation of big shots by working them long hours for
low wages.
Call it the Devil Wears Prada economy, after the novel depicting life working for
a fictionalized Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor.
But now, with the Obama administration moving to require timeandahalf
overtime pay for most salaried employees making less than $47,476 a year, that
business model is suddenly under assault. The change presents more than an
economic challenge for the companies that rely on the willingness of young,
ambitious workers to trade pay and selfrespect for a shot at a prestige job down the
road.
In the eyes of those who have survived the gantlet of midday coffee runs and
latenight emails, the administration’s overtime regulation represents nothing less
than the beginnings of a cultural shift, and not necessarily a welcome one.
“You want to bump into the boss at 8 o’clock at night,” said Dan Reynolds, chief
executive of Workman Publishing, the publisher of “What to Expect When You’re
Expecting” and many of Sandra Boynton’s children’s books.
“I’m interested in how this will affect that,” Mr. Reynolds said. “It’s more of a
cultural thing than anything else.”
Supporters of the new rule see many benefits, saying it will rein in an overly
workaholic atmosphere and perhaps diversify a rarefied world that tends to be white
and upscale, thanks to its reliance on social connections and the difficulty of working
for scraps without affluent parents.
Still, the coming change, which will take effect on Dec. 1, promises to be disorienting
for many in these prestige professions.
In a letter to the Labor Department after it proposed the overtime rule last
summer, Workman’s general manager, Jill Salayi, wrote that because the company
could not afford to pay overtime to all newly eligible staff members, it would have to
cut back their hours in many cases.
“Less will be asked of them,” she argued, “which means they will not receive
sufficient career development or see timely advancement and/or promotions.”
(Mr. Reynolds stressed that Workman was confident it would be able to adjust
financially.)
Some highprofile nonprofits have raised similar concerns. Ideologically, the
United States Public Interest Research Group, founded to fight companies that harm
consumers and the environment, and Judicial Watch, which conservative activists
created in the 1990s, largely to uncover Clinton administration corruption, have
little in common. But both groups, in letters to the Labor Department, argued that
the new overtime rule would hamper the mission of training young idealists.
“We would send them to the Clinton library if we’re doing an investigation,”
Susan Prytherch, who oversees human resources for Judicial Watch, said of junior
staff members. “We may think differently before sending them off.”
According to Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of
America, East, which represents writers in movies, television and digital media, the
model is very much alive and well in Hollywood as well.
“Being a writer’s assistant is often the way people get into the business of
writing for a living” for television, he said.
The same goes for politics, according to Raelynn Olson, the managing partner of
GMMB, which led the team that produced ads for both of Barack Obama’s
presidential campaigns. “Many of the firm’s senior leaders began their careers in
entrylevel positions here, including a number of our partners,” Ms. Olson said.
But the problem with trying to perform one job while simultaneously
demonstrating aptitude for a bigger one is that it can require extremely long hours.
At the Washington offices of BursonMarsteller, which handles public relations
and polling for a variety of corporate and political clients, socalled associates
typically make $40,000 to $50,000 a year, and often work well beyond 40 hours a
week. Some are tasked with pitching in on 24houraday monitoring of media
coverage for clients in addition to their usual work, which can keep them up late into
the night.
Under the previous federal overtime rule, which applied automatically only to
most employees making less than $23,660, those additional hours were essentially
uncounted, making the young associates a relative bargain. Under the new rule,
many of these staff members are to be paid timeandahalf overtime when they
work more than 40 hours a week, if their salary remains unchanged.
Catherine Sullivan, a company spokeswoman, said: “BursonMarsteller has
always paid, and will continue to pay, overtime to those who are eligible.” She noted
that employees below the associate level currently do receive overtime pay and also
participate in roundtheclock monitoring.
Some organizations in which young staff members are already relatively well
compensated said they would probably raise salaries over the new threshold.
But the economics of that approach may be less practical at smaller companies
where labor represents a larger share of overall costs. A former employee of the
Wylie Agency said assistant literary agents there — usually eight to 10 in the New
York office — typically earned in the $30,000s and routinely worked 50 to 60 hours
a week without overtime pay.
The former Wylie employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because
of fear of reprisals, said that there was such an expectation of long hours that anyone
arriving after 9 a.m. or leaving before 6:30 p.m. generally felt compelled to email the
entire office, giving a reason for being AWOL.
Andrew Wylie, who runs the agency, said he would consider paying time and a
half if he asked junior staff members to work overtime, but not if they worked long
hours of their own volition. “What am I supposed to do, sit at the door with a
stopwatch?” he said. “I’m not going to do that.”
David Manson, a longtime television producer who has worked on such shows
as “House of Cards” and “Bloodline,” said that some entrylevel jobs were so widely
sought after that the new overtime rule was unlikely to affect either pay or hours, at
least at smaller companies.
“There may be a certain amount of a winkandnod approach to it,” he said.
“Most people want desperately to get in any way they can.” (Mr. Manson said he
believed larger companies would heed the regulation.)
Among the winkandnod approaches already in vogue, said Eric Glatt, a former
intern in the accounting department of the Fox Searchlight movie “Black Swan,” was
to reverseengineer the base pay for production assistants so that the daily rate of
$125 would reflect compensation for 12 hours of work: eight hours at $8.928571 per
hour, and another four at $13.392857.
“That way,” he said, “rather than having people punch in and out and carefully
track their time, the presumption is simply that the production can ask people to
work 12hour days.” (Mr. Glatt is currently involved in litigation against the studio,
arguing it did not pay him to perform what should have been paid work.)
But not everybody in these industries is opposed to the rule or looking for a way
to get around it.
“I’ll be happy for everyone in town having a slightly better quality of life,” said
Tony Fratto, a former George W. Bush administration official whose public affairs
firm typically hires about 15 or 20 associates each year out of more than 1,000
applicants. Mr. Fratto said his firm already tried to limit overtime for reasons of
worklife balance.
Mr. Fratto said he had been in many offices around Washington where partners
require assistants to stick around as late in the evening as they do, then dump a pile
of research on them on their way out the door. “That is abusive,” he said.
Perhaps the most important change may be to shift the norms within companies
that officially offer overtime pay, but the burden is almost entirely on the young
assistants to claim it, which few feel comfortable doing.
Lauren Weisberger, the author of “The Devil Wears Prada,” based her book —
which inspired a 2006 movie starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway — on her
tour as Ms. Wintour’s assistant at Vogue in 1999 and 2000. She said that working
from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. was typical and that her salary almost certainly put her below
minimum wage on an hourly basis.
It never occurred to her to put in for overtime pay, which Condé Nast, the
magazine’s publisher, provides. “I certainly would not have had that conversation
with Anna; I would have had to have it with H.R.,” said Ms. Weisberger, whose latest
book will be out in July. “I don’t imagine that conversation took place a whole lot.”
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