Posted on 03/12/2014 5:19:04 AM PDT by driftdiver
Feb. 12. 2014: President Obama, surrounded by workers, signs an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers.AP
President Obama, flexing his executive authority once again, plans to order the Labor Department to expand overtime pay requirements to include millions more workers -- in a move likely to rankle the business community.
The president plans to make the announcement on Thursday at the White House, a senior administration official confirmed to Fox News. Though the administration has claimed previous executive actions had bipartisan support, officials are acknowledging that this particular move will anger business groups and congressional Republicans.
But the announcement would appear to dovetail with Democrats' election-year strategy of focusing on income inequality and the middle class.
The New York Times, citing White House officials briefed on the announcement, first reported that Obama will direct his Labor Department to require overtime pay for millions of workers currently classified as "executive or professional" employees.
The new regulations to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act reportedly would mandate that businesses provide overtime pay for those who work jobs as varied as fast-food restaurant managers, loan officers, and computer technicians. Currently, businesses are prohibited from denying overtime to a salaried worker making less than $455 per week. The rules that Obama is proposing would increase that salary threshold, though it was not clear by how much.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
They always over poll rats!
Maybe he should try this with ALL the people who work at the White House. They can give him the feedback he needs to 'get real'...
I was an hourly employee until about eight years ago when I took a salaried position with another company. It came with a nice bump in pay. I work long hours / weekends when I need to but not that often. If my position is shoved back into the hourly category a few things could happen:
1. My job title could change to keep me salaried.
2. I could be replaced by someone who makes much less per hour but gets overtime so that the cost of my position doesn’t go up.
3. They could juggle my hours to try and minimize the impact.
The company I worked for had union, non-union salary, and management employees.
The union (hourly and salary) workers got overtime. The non-union salaried such as I was never got overtime unless it was a special weekend project. I was never required to work late during the week but did so on many occasions
The shop supervisors were the ones who got screwed. They got their flat salaries with a max of 60 hours per week. Any hours above that they didn't get paid for. It was very common for them to have to work 7 days a week, 10 - 12 hours a day, especially when there were production line problems or quality issues.........
7-12s is a killer.
Only the strong survive...unless they are UAW skilled trades guys getting a 4 hour nap in there.
It will fail him. FL’s special election yesterday is the two minute warning.
I would like to see the government stay the heck out of it all together. Plus this should require legislation not some EO. “forcing companies to pay out” sounds fascist to me. The main problem is not companies but rather government. Competition will sort out pay issues if government would just get out of the way.
Great post!
Needs to be a campaign theme/slogan/meme
You take a salaried position thinking it will actually be management, which is legitimately exempt.
Companies then redefine it as a catch-all for all of the other payroll they are choosing not to spend.
THAT is the crux of the issue.
Eventually I caught on and went into a business where this was not abused.
I will say, Obama has likely just bought the votes of nearly every Assistant Manager in the retail and restaurant businesses.
I have personally experienced retail chains abusing salaried “managers” by expecting them to put in 60-70 hours per week.”””
What kind of hours do you think young lawyers make in a large firm???
As for 60-70hours a week....
I have been self-employed since about 1979.
I worked many a week that was over 60 yours & sometimes over 70. I got the same rate for every hour.
And we can see in Venuezuela & Cuba just how wonderful that worked out.
Keep in mind that this EO is coming from a person who never ran even a lemonade stand in his entire life.
I’m glad Jolly won the special election in Florida, but it should have been by a bigger margin, not just 3,000 or so votes. Of course he was outspent 3-1 and the Democrat was well-known.
Yup, that’s gonna kill even more jobs and increase dependency on big daddy government for “benefits -— AS INTENDED!
A state university in Chicago ran into problems a few years ago by converting hourly civil service positions to salaried positions. For example, turning secretaries into administrative assistants. The miss classification was pretty rampant. They ended up having to convert several hundred people to civil service classifications. I don't think the intention was necessarily to under pay workers, but to get around the more inflexible civil service hiring, firing, and work rules.
I agree with legislation versus executive order. That being said, I wonder how far people are willing to give up in order to have “jobs”; at some point people realize they are working for nothing but basic sustenance in a game rigged against them. Too many defenders of business think American workers should accept the Asian standard of living we’re increasingly being steered towards; as it stands now, homes and families are beyond the reach of far too many working Americans.
“The reason we are in dire straits in the first place is because gov.org has regulated heavy industry practically out of existence in the USA.”
There is nothing laudable about companies moving to countries where they can exploit people in conditions nobody here could defend; unregulated industry showed just how far they would go here (and gave birth to socialism and communism here in the US as a result). I hike in former mining areas along the NY/NJ border where people worked 6 1/2 days per week, year round (the temperature underground was fairly constant), and at the end of each week settled up at the company store (often resulting in growing debt). When the mines were closing, people literally left with the shirts on their backs and the families they started, abandoning their shacks and the IOUs to head elsewhere for opportunity. They had a much shorter lifespan, few luxuries like school or medical care (not that industry should have provided them - their incomes left no allowance for them), basically nothing to keep them out of the hands of leftist revolutionaries.
We are sliding back towards that era, and while people here might feel safe in their jobs (from the “before-time”; decent paying jobs), for some of us there are generations that will follow us for whom those opportunities probably won’t be available. This “global economy” will continue to destroy our way of life until we stop trading with countries with labor practices we would never permit.
That is up to each person to decide I suppose. I just know I will oppose external efforts to micromanage companies’ payment compensation policies. Let the market sort it out. That’s where I’m at.
I do work in one of these jobs, and I can assure you I do NOT feel safe in it. I have been through indefinite layoffs, a plant closing, and most recently at my latest place of employment we gave up our pension, vacation time, and a percentage of our pay to try and reverse a several year trend of financial losses.
I have no idea where you got the impression I was suggesting going back to the era of company towns and the company store, I do suggest that there IS a point where more regulation is a detriment to the worker and not a help.
Despite our recent givebacks, I still make enough to have a comfortable living while supporting a family of five on essentially one income. I AM very protective of this.
Despite being a leader in our industry for environmental stewardship, and in fact seeing the local environment improve an almost unimaginable amount since the 1960’s, nothing is going to make Washington happy unless required industry emissions are reduced to values that make it totally impractical for any heavy industry to operate.
Remember our president once bragged to the effect that he would bankrupt companies that used coal as a power source?
Yep, I work at such a company. And if we can't get around this issue, I and a great many others will be looking for another job. Again.
Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of using the rivers as open sewers, but we must be realistic about our goals. Remember, business that leave are jobs gone, and we will still end up breathing the junk they put into the air. (which is probably a great deal more that if we were able to keep them here).
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