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posted by martyb on Monday November 28 2016, @12:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the longer-hours-for-same-pay dept.

Common Dreams reports

[On November 22, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant of Texas] halted an Obama administration rule that would have expanded overtime pay for millions of workers, a decision that was slammed by employees' rights advocates.

The U.S. Department of Labor rule, which was set to go into effect on December 1, would have made overtime pay available to full-time salaried employees making up to $47,476 a year. It was expected to touch every nearly every sector [1] in the U.S. economy. The threshold for overtime pay was previously set at $23,660, and had been updated once in 40 years--meaning any full-time employees who earned more than $23,600 were not eligible for time-and-a-half when they worked more than 40 hours a week.

[...] Workers' rights advocates reacted with dismay and outrage. David Levine, CEO and co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, mourned the ruling, saying the opponents were "operating from short-sighted, out-moded thinking".

"The employees who will be hurt the most and the economies that will suffer the most are in the American heartland, where wages are already low", Levine said. "When employers pay a fair wage, they benefit from more productive, loyal, and motivated employees. That's good for a business' bottom line and for growing the middle class that our nation's economy depends on. High road businesses understand that better compensation helps build a better work culture."

[...] Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), noted [2] that the rule would have impacted up to 12.5 million workers, citing research by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

"The business trade associations and Republican-led states that filed the litigation in Texas opposing the rules have won today, but will not ultimately prevail in their attempt to take away a long-overdue pay raise for America's workers", she said. "Unfortunately, for the time being, workers will continue to work longer hours for less pay thanks to this obstructionist litigation."

[1][2] Content is behind scripts.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday November 28 2016, @02:20PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Monday November 28 2016, @02:20PM (#434039)

    If the existing minimum salary was inappropriate, does that mean there is effectively no minimum salary now? Not that it matters since $23,000 is close enough to the minimum wage (lower now in some parts of the country) that that number is irrelevant.

    If what you say is true, then this is just yet another activist ruling like usual for today's court. Oh, that minimum that has always been part of the law? It's not really part of the law, because what Congress "intended" was for it to be based solely on criteria that weren't actually used in the letter of the law. Jeez, the reason there is a minimum in place is so that employers don't get to just slap a "manager" title on you to pay you less despite unchanging responsibilities. The "role" spelled out in the law is based on a completely different economy anyway, where there were more "labor" jobs and fewer "office" jobs.

    The only thing that I can conclude is that the court is trying its damnedest to tell Congress to get off their ass and fix all the outdated laws. This pattern going back decades of fixing outdated law by executive order and executive management practice was never the appropriate constitutional way to run the government anyway. One can only hope that with the entire government controlled by one political party now, we'll at least see more laws passed with a more cohesive vision. Given how long it's been since that was the case, it's more likely that they've forgotten how to do anything but obstruct all work being done in any form.

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