"lead reservationist"

 Under federal law, employers are required to pay time-and-a-half overtime to salaried workers after 40 hours if they make about $35,500 or less.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

A couple of years ago, yours truly wrote blurbs about Middle Management, the modern-day equivalent of purgatory as one has to constantly prove one's worth to upper management in order to hold onto one's job, a situation becoming all the more tenuous with the advent of AI. With this being said, the artful use of language and the skill set of assigning management status to workers who are not managers pays off as management jobs don't include overtime pay as one gets paid by salary, not by hour. 

Dr. Cohen and his co-authors estimate that the practice of mislabeling workers as managers to deny them overtime, which often relies on dubious-sounding titles like “lead reservationist” and “food cart manager,” cost the workers about $4 billion per year, or more than $3,000 per mislabeled employee.

And the practice appears to be on the rise: Dr. Cohen said the number of jobs with dubious-sounding managerial titles grew over the period he and his co-authors studied.

Experts say the denial of overtime pay is part of a broader strategy to drive down labor costs in recent decades by staffing stores with as few workers as possible. If a worker calls in sick, or more customers turn up than expected, the misclassified manager is often asked to perform the duties of a rank-and-file worker without additional cost to the employer.

When companies are financially strapped or in low-wage industries like retail and fast food, they are more likely to misclassify regular workers as managers, a recent report found.
Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

The fix is in.

Again ... it's all about the money.