Do I have to work a certain amount of hours in order to get paid monthly?
"Frequency of paychecks is up to the company. Many pay monthly. Some pay twice a month, or every other week. I haven't heard of any paying more frequently unless they were tiny ""mom and pop"" businesses or grunt-labor/fast-food minimum-wage jobs. Cutting the checks more often is more expensive for the company. And frequency of pay is  one of the things you agreed to in the paperwork you signed when you were hired."
In case you didn't read the article, they're capped at OVERTIME pay. In other words, they'll continue to get paid their normal salary, but won't get additional benefit over 40 hours worked.   Not sure what kind of work you're in, but overtime isn't typical in my part of the world. "This is common. He worked there for 2 years under this scheme, so I'm guessing he was cool with it. Lawsuits pop up when they get mad at management. (*""I worked 70 hours a week for 2 years and they pass me up on the promotion? Hell no, lawsuit time.""*)  These mutually beneficial arrangements are almost always agreed on by employer and employee. Employees need hours, employers do not want to pay overtime." Depends on the job.  At my current job, when I leave work for the day, I'm done.  But I have friends who would likely lose their jobs if they weren't available outside of normal hours.  They prefer having a source of income to not having one, even if it means that reddit user ngroot considers them a doormat. In addition to the other comments there are things like training costs. Lower paid employees tend to turn over more quickly so instead of training one employee for 4 weeks and staying for 3 years you spend 12 weeks over that same time period as the minimum wage employees each only stay for a year. Also, you aren't necessarily scheduling all three people at the same time, it might be 3 part time workers at $12 an hour covering one role vs. one full time $20 employee working 40 hours a week. The unstated bit of info is that most minimum wage workers who want to work full time aren't able to. The employers prefer part-timers who get fewer benefits, and whose shifts can be altered at the last minute to match up to real or forecasted demand. If you are a retail clerk or fast food worker, you generally can't get a full time job and with the constantly shifting hours you find it a challenge to get a second part time job because you can't tell the hiring manager in advance when you'll be available to work. "If you're really interested in the long-term success of your business, and you can get by in your personal finances without taking anything from the business for the time being, then don't.   There is no ""legal requirement"" to pay yourself a prevailing wage if doing so would put the company out of business.  it is common for a company's principals not to draw wages from the business until it is viable enough to sustain payroll.  I was in that situation when I first began my business, so the notion that somehow I'm violating a law by being fiscally responsible for my own company is nonsense. Be wise with your new business.  You didn't state why you feel the need to take some kind of payment out, but this can be a crucial mistake if it imperils your business or if that money could be better spent on marketing or some other areas which improve revenues. You can always create a salary deferral agreement between yourself and your own company which basically states that the company owes you wages but you are, for the time being, willing to defer accepting them until such time that the company has sufficient revenues to pay you.  That's one solution, but the simplest answer is, if you don't need the money you're thinking of paying yourself, don't do it.  Let that money work for you in the business so that it pays off better in the long run. Good luck!" Another thing to remember is that a lot of these one-off police jobs have 4 hour minimum pay requirements, even when they last half an hour (at least in Massachusetts). If you can schedule two jobs such that each one is half an hour, you could work one hour at lunch time and get paid for 8. "IANAL, but I had heard (and would appreciate someone more qualified commenting on this) that one reason these things were often found unenforceable is that there is no consideration.  The contract is to bind you for your work each day, but once you stop working, they allege you have a continued obligation that transcends your time at the company.  Claiming that your day-to-day compensation covers this is as if to say some part of that compensation is not for your work but to pay you for not going elsewhere.  It would be nice to see at minimum a requirement to separate these two concepts into separate contracts as bundling them creates a blur, and most importantly doesn't allow you to negotiate or walk away from the terms of one part without the other.  At the heart of any ""market"", which the job market purports to be, is a sense that a fair price is reached when both parties can walk away from a bad deal. This is not so in the case of employment because, as Adlai Stevenson said, ""a hungry man is not a free man"", so someone who needs to eat (or feed a family) has a need to take an offer that is already biasing their acceptance of work, and this quasi-duress is compounded when a company can attach additional pressures that work agains that person's ability to fairly negotiate possible improvements of what may already have been a bad situation.  I'm of the impression that duress itself has been argued to be a reason to hold a contract invalid.  But more abstractly and generally, any time two parties are bargaining asymmetrically (I'm not sure the legal definition, but intuitively I'd say where one party has the ability to force a contract change and the other party is not), then those terms have to be suspect.  Also, for the special case the pay is anything near minimum wage, I would suggest asking the question of whether the part of the compensation that is salary, not ""keeping you from working for the competition"", is the wage paid consistent with minimum wage, or does it have to draw from the pool of money that is not about wage but is about incentivizing you to not move.  And, finally, if they stop paying you, and each day you've been paid a little to work and a little to incentivize you to leave, then are you getting a continued revenue stream to continue to incentivize you not to work for the competition? If not, there would seem again not to be consideration.  As I said, I'm not an expert in this. I just follow such matters sometimes in the news. But I don't see these issues getting discussed here and I hope we'll see some useful responses from the crowd here, and also the smart folks at reddit can help through their discussions to form some useful political and legal defenses to help individuals overcome what is really a moral outrage on this matter.  Capitalism is an often cruel engine.  I worked at a company where one of the bosses said to me, after contributing really great things that added structurally in fundamental ways to the company, ""don't tell me what you've done, tell me what you've done lately"". Capitalism makes people scrap every day to prove their worth. So it's morally an outrage to see it also trying even as it beats down the price of someone and tells them they aren't entitled to better, to tell them that they may not go somewhere else that thinks they are better. That is not competition and it is not fair.    Indentured servitude, not slavery, is more technically correct. And yet it is a push to treat people like capital, so slavery is not inappropriate metaphorically.  The topic is non-competes, but really it's about businesses not wanting to have to compete for employees; that is, about businesses not wanting capitalism to prevail in hiring.  Sorry for the length." It depends on how much your time is worth. Those interest rates from that amount of money will not generate anything convenient. And the effort you make to fulfill the requirements can possibly turn into an overhead cost to getting that $34 a month. For instance, lets say you make $20/hour but you spent an hour trying to figure out how their billpay works. Suddenly not worth it. And if that interest rate is only granted up to $10k, then the compounding effects will be nullified because they won't even grant that same interest rate once the money starts to grow. Hope that helps. Working many hours is not uncommon. When I worked at Fidelity the first half of the month was about 40+, by the second half of the month it was easily 50+.  Working on Saturdays or holidays was not uncommon, it was a surprise if you were NOT there.  After Fidelity I worked at the AMA for some time and their hours were very structured.  I never worked a weekend while there and things were very smooth.  So from my personal experience it depends on what company you are working at.  Some are fast paced and demand a lot of your time, others are very structured.  If you're not married go for the busy job and get as much experience as you can.  If along the way you have a family find a job that can offer better structure.  When you start earning a decent salary you can easily afford a dog walker, maid, etc. and you manage to balance out things pretty well.  Its weird things just fall into place like that.  *shrug* "I feel that getting money sooner than later is always advantageous. If I offered you the choice between getting: Which option would you take? I would take the last option. And for the same reason, from a purely-numbers point of view, I would argue that getting paid biweekly is preferable (assuming the the annual salary is pro-rated fairly, and barring any compulsive spending habits). Your calculations suggest to me that they are trying to answer the question, ""Looking at a single year or month (or some other fixed amount of time) in a vacuum, is there any financial benefit to being paid bi-weekly over monthly?"". The analysis seems to be focusing on comparing the two pay schedules on a month-by-month basis, noting when one is paid bi-weekly, some months you get paid more times than the other. However, one could also compare the two pay schedules on a fortnight-by-fortnight basis, and note that when one is paid monthly, many fortnights you don't get paid at all, and some you get paid a lot. Or one could compare the two pay schedules on an hour-by-hour basis, too. But in the long run, the money adds up to be the same amount. I prefer getting it as soon as I can." Never saw such a study, would be very interested in it.  I think it depends on the kind of job.  I'd think that - on average - while individually, fixed hours are probably less effective than flexible one, at the scale of a average size company, the gain is offset by the burden from having too many different schedules amongst workers. There's no such requirement in general. If your particular employer requires that - you should address the question to the HR/payroll department. From my experience, matches are generally not conditioned on when you contribute, only how much. "I once had to train a guy who worked 2.5 hours away. They had me drive each way everyday, paying both mileage and my hourly rate for the drive. So everyday was 5 hours drive time, 3 hours of work, plus mileage.   I asked for permission to get a hotel room, which would break even with my gas reimbursement and let me work with the guy 35 hours a week instead of 15.  They said no, my boss had discretion on driving, but had to get hotels approved. I was also told I had to work 5x8hrs days, not 4x10hrs, which would have saved a day of mileage and meals and given 5 extra hours a week with him.  There was also a minimum number of training hours that had to be done, so the lesser hours per week meant I did this for months instead of weeks if I had a hotel room.  I even got yelled at one day by the location manager because I called out due to weather. ""It's against policy to let people call out due to weather unless the location closed due to it."" I had to explain that the ice and snow would drop my driving speed too much and I would spend half the day driving there, the other half driving back and spend no time working." Salary pay does not compute to hourly wages. As a salary employee you aren't being paid for hours worked, you are being paid for a week of work. Sometimes that requires more time other times less. You could just as well divide your salary by the amount of overtime you work and each week you work 40 hours say that you are being over paid or paid for time not worked.