Take a look at the headline of today's WP article by
Kirstin Downey: "
Plan Expands Eligibility for Overtime Pay". Sounds so certain, so unambiguous, you can almost feel those extra bills crowding in your pocket. "The plan" is the FairPay Initiative unveiled by the Secretary of Labor
Elaine Chao on April 20. You may wonder "what is Bush's Secretary of Labor doing expanding entitlements to the worthless lazy wretches who actually have to work?" Doesn't this cut against the grain of conservative ideology? Whatever happened to "tough love" and self-reliance? If you are asking yourself these questions you may find the FairPay overtime standards vaguely reminiscent of the Clear Skies initiative, which lowered pollution standards.
But Downey has no place in her head for such simplistic analogies. After all, the
Department of Labor press release loudly exclaims that "Workers Win!" under the new rules.
The author finds the giddiness contagious: "The Labor Department will allow workers who earn up to $100,000 a year to be eligible for overtime pay, a substantial shift upward from an earlier proposal that Democrats had promised to make an issue in the presidential campaign" exclaims the first sentence of the article. This is better than anyone had wished for! "More low-wage workers would become automatically eligible for overtime under the final rules" elaborates the second paragraph. In paragraph four we get a brief mention that a reasearch organization has found that 8 million workers would loose their overtime pay under the new regulations, but "Elaine L. Chao has countered that the original rules would cost fewer than 1 million more highly paid workers their overtime checks, while expanding overtime eligibility to millions of lower-wage workers." Ok, case closed, time to move on. Paragraphs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13 are unambiguously positive to the new overtime standards--plain regurgetations of the DOL press release praising the new standards. In paragraph 9, some disembodied ramblings, without support, context or statistics, from Tom Harkin, who is criticizing the new standards.
In the last paragraph we get a hint that the "research organization" that found that the new regulation will lead to a loss of overtime pay for 8 million workers is no other than the Economic Policy Institute, whose vice president Ross Eisenbrey is quoted. In a brazen propaganda spin deserving of Joseph Goebbels, Downey writes that Eisenbrey "said it sounded as though the department 'had made some positive changes'... but he said he would reserve judgment until he could review the actual regulations."
This is what Mr. Eisenbrey really said:
"Any day now, the Bush administration will issue new rules that could deprive more than 8 million American workers of overtime pay. When it does, expect more talk about how the rules are good for workers.
"Don't believe it. The administration's claims about its overtime rules haven't been any more reliable than its predictions about job creation or Medicare costs. The ones who will reap the benefits of these new rules are not working Americans but their employers.
"The new rules will make it much easier for employers to reclassify workers as managers or administrators, making them ineligible for time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. The Department of Labor claims that only 644,000 workers will lose overtime pay, but their own data show what a gross underestimate that is. When you factor in all the workers whose jobs could be reclassified, it's not 644,000 who will lose out--already far too many--but 12 times that many.
Without examining closely EPI's estimates we should suspend judgement on their accuracy too, but putting a positive spin on Mr. Eisenbrey's comments is scandalous. This article does not deserve to be published in a major paper. Compared to the WSJ article "US Plans to Issue New Set of Rules On Overtime Pay" by McKinnon and Pierceall, the Downey article is sheer Bizarro.