Here’s a suggestion for how Democrats can appeal to more voters: bring back the forty-hour workweek. Who enjoys working fifty, sixty or more hours per week?
Wait, don’t we still have a forty-hour workweek? Not if you’re in the class of employees considered "exempt" from the wage and hours laws. If an employee is exempt, then the employer can tell him "work twenty hours of overtime this week or be fired." And a large percentage of white collar employees fall under the exempt classification.
Apologists for corporate greed will say that the employee can just quit if he doesn’t like it, but as I explained yesterday, there’s an unequal power relationship between the employer and the employee. Because the employee’s job is his sole source of income, and because finding new jobs is very difficult, the employer always has the upper hand.
Apologists for corporate greed will also say that forced overtime work benefits the economy. But this is not true, it only benefits the bigwig managers and shareholders of the corporation. The economy as a whole does not benefit, because an employee’s free time also has economic value. When an employee’s overtime labor is free for the employer, the employer is likely to take advantage of it often because it’s a free resource! But while it costs the employer nothing, the employee loses.
If a numerical example helps, suppose that ten hours of overtime work has a value of 10 to the employer, but that same ten hours of overtime has a value of 30 to the employee. The net loss to the economy by forcing the employee to work overtime is 20. By changing the laws so that businesses must pay employees time and a half for overtime work, we help to better economically align the interests of employers and employees, and thereby make our economy more efficient.
Unfortunately there are no bold initiatives coming from Democrats these days to make the lives of regular Americans better. Democrats are acquiescing to the interests of big money corporate donors just like the Republicans.