The Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies equally to all age generations in the workforce. HR reviews manager job descriptions against FLSA criteria and then classifies them as exempt or non-exempt. One of the reasons why managers take an HR survey, usually yearly, on the type of activities they do, is to keep the job status (exempt or non-exempt) accurate. If HR finds from your survey you are doing exempt type activities, they investigate and often reclassify your job to exempt to comply with the law. Often an L2 or L3 can't get additional headcount to support the work or there are budget cutbacks, so they 'expect' or turn a blind eye to non-exempt managers working off the clock- which is wrong. Wrong for the manager to expect and wrong for the employee to work off the clock.
Here is a quote from the FLSA web site:
"To meet the FLSA salary test, an employee must earn at least $684 a week to be considered an exempt, salaried employee. This means that among salaried employees, some are entitled to overtime and others aren't. Salaried, exempt employees receive a fixed rate of pay according to the job they're hired to perform, regardless of the number of hours it takes to do the work.
On the other hand, salaried, non-exempt employees also receive a fixed rate of pay, but they receive 1.5 times their equivalent hourly rate for overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a work week.
According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, a non-exempt employee in a private business is one who meets the following criteria:
Paid hourly
Makes at least the federal minimum wage
Has less responsibility than others
Because non-exempt employees are typically paid by the hour (meaning they clock in and clock out every day) — and are often paid less than FLSA-exempt employees — non-exempt employees qualify for overtime. If you classify them as non-exempt, you have to pay them at least minimum wage, and, if they work more than 40 hours a week, you have to pay them overtime."