Last Call For Going Into Overtime, Con't

Last month I talked about the Obama administration expanding Labor Department rules on overtime pay for salaried employees and who should be eligible for it, making millions of people in entry-level salary jobs finally able to earn time-and-a-half pay.


The business community is starting to weigh in on this, and they pretty much despise it.  Their tack is simple: low-level salaried positions are mostly filled by younger workers, and as we all know (snort) Millennials are the worst.

The Dallas Fed surveys factory owners to compile the monthly release, and the final report includes edited anecdotes on how businesses are doing.

In May, a lot was said about the Department of Labor's new overtime rule, which more than doubles the income threshold of eligibility to $47,476 per year from $23,660.

The concern was that this would raise the costs of labor. And one manufacturer was furious while saying that millennials already weren't bothering to give their money's worth.

Those damn kids and their hippity-hop music! 


By the way, that manufacturer's complaint to the Dallas Fed? This:

The Department of Labor rules and other government regulations are seriously slowing down business development, increasing overhead costs, reducing productivity and causing increased management time spent on non-customer-focused/non-value-added efforts. We have a serious productivity problem with office workers and estimated that less than 50 percent of their time is spent on value-creating business activities. The younger workers are often off task, engaged on social media, on the internet, texting on phones and other unproductive activities.

The Department of Labor must realize that if we are supposed to pay them overtime for work they should do during normal work this will make us have to focus on micromanaging employees and reducing compensation to reflect actual productivity of a mandated 40 hour or less workweek.

You kids don't do anything during the day anyway except Snapchat and Reddit, why the hell would we pay you cogs overtime?!?!


I love how the problem is suddenly office workers are playing too much Candy Crush.  Look, I work in corporate IT and I know the largest abusers of company IT policies aren't the rank and file drones, they are the managers, directors and execs who think they are entitled to using the company broadband to watch The Masters and March Madness and check their stock options.


Value-creating business activities my black ass.