President Obama plans to
expand overtime protections to cover more than the tiny 11 percent of salaried workers who currently fall under an absurdly low $455 per week threshold for eligibility. But how many more workers will get overtime when Obama makes his planned move? How high will his Labor Department set that salary threshold under which workers are guaranteed time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours a week? That is the big question, and reports are that the Obama administration
may be aiming too low:
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank influential on Democratic policymaking, told HuffPost that his talks with White House personnel lead him to believe they're leaning toward a modest threshold of perhaps $42,000. That would cover 35 percent of salaried workers, according to Eisenbrey's calculations.
Eisenbrey and Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, have advocated for a threshold of roughly $51,000. They base their number on the 1975 threshold, adjusting for inflation as well as the higher education level of the modern workforce. That would cover 47 percent of salaried workers.
The Labor Department's own chief economist, Heidi Shierholz, advocated an even more ambitious figure before she assumed her post at the agency: $58,000, which would cover an estimated 54 percent.
By contrast, in 1975, 65 percent of salaried workers were under the overtime eligibility threshold. So "erosion" would be an understatement of a description of what's happened since. Obama has the chance to roll that back, and the difference between $42,000 and $51,000 is a whopping 2.6 million more people getting paid time-and-a-half when they work more than full time. That means
putting the brakes on employers that hire salaried workers just above the overtime threshold, call them managers, and then push them to work around the clock without overtime. A $42,000 threshold is not enough for today's workers, and it's certainly not enough to stand up to another generation of erosion.
Join Daily Kos in asking President Obama to provide the same fair overtime protections for today’s middle class that were once enjoyed by our parents.
