Time For More Time And A Half

In the age of record corporate profits, President Obama will use power given to him by Congress through the Fair Standards Labor Act to classify more salaried professional workers as eligible for overtime.

On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.

Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.

Bush used the FSLA to push the number down to its current threshold, $455 a week, or about $11.38 an hour, back in 2004. 

Keep in mind that comes out to under $24,000 a year.  If you make the equivalent of more than that, and your job is management or  technical in nature where your workload isn't directly determined by others (like help desk or customer service), the dirty secret of the business world is that you're salaried and get worked however many hours over 40 you can be worked, no OT.  This is especially the case in management and in IT/clerical positions.  Pretty fun to work a job making two grand a month and have to put in 60-70 hours a week, every week, right?  Why, that works out to making less than minimum wage...

In addition, Mr. Obama will try to change rules that allow employers to define which workers are exempt from receiving overtime based on the kind of work they perform. Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.

White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.

“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.

Needless to say, Republicans are howling.  After all, Bush got businesses the power to classify millions of workers as "executive" and leave them stuck working nights and weekends for free.  They loved him for it.  Obama is about to piss some people off.

And I say good.