The effects of the Obama administration’s expansion of overtime eligibility will be felt far and wide. The Economic Policy Institute breaks it down. Increasing the threshold—from $23,660 to $47,476—under which salaried workers are automatically eligible for time and a half if they work more than 40 hours will be a huge boost for millennials:
Only 2.0 million salaried millennials (age 16–34) were covered by the old overtime salary threshold. Raising the salary threshold to $47,476 will directly benefit an additional 4.5 million millennials, with most of them gaining eligibility for overtime for the first time—bringing the number of millennials covered by the overtime salary threshold to 6.5 million. While millennials make up 28.2 percent of the total salaried workforce, they represent 36.3 percent of the 12.5 million salaried workers directly benefiting from the higher overtime threshold.
And the benefits will be felt in every state:
In South Carolina, for example, 30.3 percent of the salaried workforce—219,000 people—will directly benefit from the new rule, bringing the total share of the salaried workforce covered under the new threshold to 39.9 percent. In Texas, over one million people will directly benefit—25.4 percent of the state’s salaried workforce.
Oh, and by the way, “more than 100,000 people will benefit by getting a job doing the work that overworked people used to do for free.”
A fair day’s wage
● If you think you’ve been discriminated against over your family responsibilities, you’re not alone, and you might well have a decent chance in court.
● A plan to raise taxes on income over $1 million passed a first vote in the Massachusetts legislature. The end goal is a ballot vote in 2018.
● As @blogwood put it: "Another protesting Verizon worker struck by another scab driving truck w/ suspended license."
● Seven things you need to know about the new overtime rule.
● Can labor learn from Silicon Valley?
The Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, for example, has been developing worker coops in which low-wage, irregular workers such as senior home health aides, dog walkers, and domestic workers—the folks who did gig work before Silicon Valley coopted the term—can work on app-based platforms that promote decent labor standards and payscales. The group is working with progressive coders on “coopify,” a platform that seeks to provide a hiring hall-like hub to match cooperative workers with clients for sustainable, steady work.
Sarah Leberstein of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) says that by putting on-demand service workers at the controls, the system “would be a nice counterpoint to the venture capitalists ... These would really enable the workers to set their own standards and to share equally in the profits that their labor is generating, instead of having all of the profits go to the company that is in charge of deciding how much it pays the workers.