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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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 28 2016, @09:38PM
Because protecting people is the government's job.
Like making poor life choices? Having bad belief systems (like the idea that "protecting" is a government's job)?
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:25AM
...the idea that "protecting" is a government's job
Not trolling, asking for information: if the government's job isn't protecting the people it represents, then what is the government's job?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:57AM
if the government's job isn't protecting the people it represents, then what is the government's job?
When you start babbling about "protection" without specifying what sort of protection, then you get all sorts of perverse outcomes. It's like the stories of genies, be careful what you wish for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:57PM
When you start babbling about "protection" without specifying what sort of protection, then you get all sorts of perverse outcomes. It's like the stories of genies, be careful what you wish for.
And you didn't answer the question: What is the government's job?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:11AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:35AM
We could start with police, move on to the military, and the courts. That's government protecting you from basic violations of law, international threats, and also protecting the operation of businesses under the rule of law. It would seem that the three line up with the other three, but there's actually lots of cross-over between them.
So, before this whole nasty "organized labor" thing, we had apprenticeships in places like tanneries, where an average apprentice had an average life expectancy of 5 years after taking the job. That's one example of "free market labor" without government interventions. I'd like to think that things like child labor laws are progress, even if I did push their limits and get my first paying job just after I turned 15, and my Grandmother forged a birth certificate so she could go to work at a true age of 12.
There are lots of things that I think can be improved in our current labor environment - people habitually working >60 hours a week, tallying >2500 hours per year, because it's more efficient for the business owner to use them this way instead of hiring 3 people instead of 2... that's one that could use some refinement, and, as much as I understand the law, that seems to be what this particular bill is addressing, and addressing effectively. It's not a pay raise, it's not forbidding overtime work, it's simply making it more expensive to work a smaller number of people longer hours as compared to giving more people employment for fewer hours each.
Sorry if it sounds like another rule to you, to me it sounds like a simple adjustment of an existing rule to reflect the realities of inflation over the last 20 years. A proper law would have set limits to track changes in cost of living, but not all lawmakers are that farsighted, and some of them can't comprehend math that complex - certainly not well enough to explain it to their constituency.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:21AM
So, before this whole nasty "organized labor" thing, we had apprenticeships in places like tanneries, where an average apprentice had an average life expectancy of 5 years after taking the job.
Do you have evidence for that claim that doesn't come out of a movie?
I'd like to think that things like child labor laws are progress, even if I did push their limits and get my first paying job just after I turned 15, and my Grandmother forged a birth certificate so she could go to work at a true age of 12.
Funny how your family's lives and mine are contrary evidence to that affection of yours.
because it's more efficient for the business owner to use them this way instead of hiring 3 people instead of 2...
Ever wonder why hiring 2 people is so much better than hiring 3 that businesses would do that? There are huge fixed costs to employing a person. And the bureaucracy coming from regulation is a big reason why.
Sorry if it sounds like another rule to you, to me it sounds like a simple adjustment of an existing rule to reflect the realities of inflation over the last 20 years.
Inflation justifies work week reduction? You're doing economics wrong to bring that in at all.
This is cargo cult economics where the trappings of a good economy are mistaken for the real deal. Here's the car example. Note that many rich people have flashy cars. So if we force everyone to have a Lamborghini, then that means that everyone is now rich.
Similarly, we force everyone to work less than 40 hours and require minimum wage to be really high, then the theory is that we'll have the economy to support those constraints. But when in the past, conditions were nice for labor was because labor had great pricing power, not because we forced people to work less. Attempting to create the symptom isn't going to create the economy of the past which generated that symptom.
It's boggling to see a grown person believe that they can in a weakening economy force developed world labor to become less valuable and as a result, somehow employers will employ more such labor. Welcome to continuing shrinkage in the population that is employed combined with desperate people moving to where the jobs are now.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 29 2016, @05:41AM
Note that tanners were just a single example of hazardous labor practices before we had labor protection laws - many industries were not good for the people who worked in them:
http://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/11633.ch01.pdf [ucpress.edu]
do your own Google search if you're really interested in what historians guess the net effect of employment on life expectancy was. I'll go with evidence from my own life - when my Grandfather would come home from the chrome plating factory and sweat acid into the furniture strong enough to rot the coverings within a month or two. It didn't kill him right away, but he was the first of my Grandparents to die, by a margin of 10 years - and my other Grandfather died of cancer that started in his toe, likely due to exposure to carcinogens, but he was exposed to so many carcinogens in his working life that it's impossible to say if a single one got him or a combination of them all.
Work week reduction was written into law with this bill many decades ago, inflation has been slowly eroding its effectiveness ever since - I don't consider that erosion progress, or desirable - I support the updating of the limit and would frankly be happy to see this country make more progress in work week reduction, average annual paid vacation, and maybe even maternity leave like most of the rest of the planet. Working a portion of the population hard while making it easier for the rest to slip into poverty does not feel like the way to keep America great in the future.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:37AM
Work week reduction was written into law with this bill many decades ago, inflation has been slowly eroding its effectiveness ever since - I don't consider that erosion progress, or desirable - I support the updating of the limit and would frankly be happy to see this country make more progress in work week reduction, average annual paid vacation, and maybe even maternity leave like most of the rest of the planet. Working a portion of the population hard while making it easier for the rest to slip into poverty does not feel like the way to keep America great in the future.
Again inflation has nothing to do with this since it's not an issue of money. It's an erosion of labor power due to competition from developing world labor. Reducing labor hours just makes the competitiveness problem even worse since it increases the cost of developed world labor without making it any better in the process.
The huge thing that gets ignored throughout your posts is that you need the economy and technology to back your desired protections (even when they're actually protections). For example, it wouldn't make sense to implement modern labor protection into medieval Europe because you wouldn't know what protections work or not (Does praying to the Virgin Mary protect you better from cancer than praying to Saint Peregrine Laziosi, the patron saint of cancer sufferers? More study is needed.). And it would put you at a significant economic and military disadvantage to everyone else, which makes you roadkill in European politics.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:45PM
Are you that afraid that the American economy is so weak that it's in danger of collapse like the Soviet Union in 1990?
Are you really of the opinion that treating our own people well is going to weaken our country relative to others that flog theirs hard in sweatshops?
The Soviets collapsed in 1990 because of a combination of fear in their leadership and excessive authoritanarianism in their labor force. Their form of Communism, twisted as it was, would have survived much longer if they didn't push it to the breaking point trying to match Kissinger and Regan's military threats with convincing counter-threats of their own. They may not have ever become the number one superpower in the world with their systems, but they would still be around today if they had backed off the compete at all costs mentality and focused a bit more on the quality of life of their people.
The Japanese flogged themselves harder than the US ever has, and they have an impressive, though not exactly booming, economy as a result, but I don't envy their culture nor wish to emulate it.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:21PM
Are you that afraid that the American economy is so weak that it's in danger of collapse like the Soviet Union in 1990?
Of course.
Are you really of the opinion that treating our own people well is going to weaken our country relative to others that flog theirs hard in sweatshops?
This is a fantasy. You aren't proposing to treat people well. You are proposing to put poor people out of jobs so that Walmart doesn't get an imaginary subsidy. And we all should be concerned about where the US is going to be in the future relative to China, the next superpower.
The Japanese flogged themselves harder than the US ever has, and they have an impressive, though not exactly booming, economy as a result, but I don't envy their culture nor wish to emulate it.
It was booming prior to the 1990-1991 recession. It wasn't their work ethic that failed, but rather many decades of bad economic policy decisions. And they actually work less hours than US workers do.
I'll note several things wrong with your approach. First, it destroys democracy in several ways. It interferes with employment decisions and it gives more power and surveillance information to present and future tyranny. Second, it destroys jobs and economies. Puerto Rico is a mess right now because so much of their economy went away after they implemented the US's nation-wide minimum wage. Areas with low cost of living get burned when policies are implemented as if they were high cost of living areas.
We've already seen a half century of movement of industries to the developing world as well as many service industries. And finally, it harms the people who you claim to help. There's higher unemployment among the groups that are riskiest to employ, such as certain minorities, young adults, and ex-convicts and many of those people simply aren't worth employing under today's regulations.
Punishing Walmart doesn't make anything better. It's time for you to move on to real problems.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:42PM
You know, it's not about punishing WalMart - WalMart is the easy example, but tons of mom and pop small businesses effectively do the same thing, underpaying employees to the point that they are simultaneously on social support to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The worst of the offenders are the ones who are currently paying $25K per year to "salaried, exempt" people and leaning on them to work 60 and 70 hours a week, making it difficult - close to impossible, for them to do things like get more education or training to improve their employability, or even just find a less crappy job at their current skill level because they're spending all their waking hours "serving the company."
Some degree of "free market" is good for the jobs-economy, but this is a corner case where it pretty clearly serves no good purpose to allow low pay for mandatory high hours jobs. Maybe Puerto Rico was better off without minimum wage, or maybe it could have been instituted with a slow roll-up instead of slamming it into place from 0 to $8 per hour overnight (or whatever they did.) Maybe this law would be better with more complexity built in, some local cost of living index where the law reads at $25K per year limit for South Dakota and $150K per year for Manhattan.
Quitting work isn't an option for a lot of people, and that's where legal employee protections are a good thing.
Opposing every single employment law on principle isn't protecting the free market, it's Libertardism.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:01PM
but this is a corner case where it pretty clearly serves no good purpose to allow low pay for mandatory high hours jobs
No, it's not. First, Walmart doesn't do large amounts of overtime. You're introducing a new straw man by conflating with yet more employers doing different sorts of alleged bad behavior.
Second, if people are desperate enough to choose high work, low wage salary jobs, then more such jobs is still better than less. The higher the supply of jobs, even of relatively crappy jobs, the better for everyone.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:34PM
Second, if people are desperate enough to choose high work, low wage salary jobs, then more such jobs is still better than less. The higher the supply of jobs, even of relatively crappy jobs, the better for everyone.
And that's where you're missing the point - the law under discussion makes long (excessively long, if you do anything besides eat and sleep outside work) work week jobs relatively expensive compared to 40 hours and less per week.
This law is resloping the playing field to make it more attractive to hire more people working 40 hours per week and less, as opposed to fewer people working longer hours. That is a net increase in the supply of jobs, as well as making the jobs that are available relatively less crappy (unless what you want from a job is a place to hide from the rest of your life, in which case, knock yourself out and work for free.)
BTW, if we're talking about punishing WalMart to improve workers' quality of life, we need to get into the issue of massive part-time employment which is a whole different animal.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @07:46PM
And that's where you're missing the point - the law under discussion makes long (excessively long, if you do anything besides eat and sleep outside work) work week jobs relatively expensive compared to 40 hours and less per week.
To you. To other people, they might have other priorities like higher pay or opening doors to better paying jobs.
This law is resloping the playing field to make it more attractive to hire more people working 40 hours per week and less, as opposed to fewer people working longer hours.
Unless it "reslopes" the playing field to encourage developing world employment and automation like so many reslopings of the past half century.
BTW, if we're talking about punishing WalMart to improve workers' quality of life, we need to get into the issue of massive part-time employment which is a whole different animal.
Another example of current labor policy going places its proponents didn't imagine. Unintended consequences.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 30 2016, @08:46PM
This law is resloping the playing field to make it more attractive to hire more people working 40 hours per week and less, as opposed to fewer people working longer hours.
Unless it "reslopes" the playing field to encourage developing world employment and automation like so many reslopings of the past half century.
Yet again, fear of the outside world taking our sucky jobs away. You've got a president elect who talks big about putting trade barriers back up, the bleeding heart liberals who wrote all the history books I was ever taught from seem to think that going too far in that direction ends up making a country's economy resemble today's Cuba, North Korea, or the U.S. of A. pre World War II.
BTW, if we're talking about punishing WalMart to improve workers' quality of life, we need to get into the issue of massive part-time employment which is a whole different animal.
Another example of current labor policy going places its proponents didn't imagine. Unintended consequences.
So, better to never regulate anything, hmmm?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @10:46PM
This law is resloping the playing field to make it more attractive to hire more people working 40 hours per week and less, as opposed to fewer people working longer hours.
Unless it "reslopes" the playing field to encourage developing world employment and automation like so many reslopings of the past half century.
Yet again, fear of the outside world taking our sucky jobs away. You've got a president elect who talks big about putting trade barriers back up, the bleeding heart liberals who wrote all the history books I was ever taught from seem to think that going too far in that direction ends up making a country's economy resemble today's Cuba, North Korea, or the U.S. of A. pre World War II.
Here, I'm more concerned about economic illiterates destroying the US from the inside than I am the outside world. The hubbub in this thread about Walmart and company is a really good example. No one has expressed a reason why Walmart hiring poor people is a bad thing. It's all an assertion that Walmart and should be paying more. Apparently, you know what is right, even though you remain without a clue about what you're speaking of.
And odd how that you compare the US to Cuba and North Korea even though it has never been like those other two countries even at the worst of times. Maybe you should read real history books.
So, better to never regulate anything, hmmm?
False dilemma. There are actual problems such as pollution which we already regulate for. What I find particularly telling about this is that we don't have a problem which requires regulation. Instead, we have problems such as substantial barriers to entry for new businesses which come from too much regulation and other costs imposed on employers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 30 2016, @11:15PM
he hubbub in this thread about Walmart and company is a really good example. No one has expressed a reason why Walmart hiring poor people is a bad thing. It's all an assertion that Walmart and should be paying more. Apparently, you know what is right, even though you remain without a clue about what you're speaking of.
Apparently you're confusing me with the rest of the threads here... WalMart hiring poor people is a great thing, it's absolutely what should happen. The OP is nothing to do with pay raises, and less to do with WalMart, since, as you point out, they hardly hire any poor people at all for >30 hours a week, much less 40. The OP is about requirement of increased compensation for overtime. The great conservative hue and cry is that prices will rise in response, yet, what at all in the law says that net take home pay has to rise? Can't base pay decrease and keep the labor cost revenue neutral? I suppose not below minimum wage, but, here again, OP is about raising an existing salary floor for overtime exempt from mid-20somethingK/yr to 40somethingK/yr, so that pay-band is still a bit above minimum wage.
If you want to go off on the WalMart tangent, we should rather be talking about why they don't even give their minimum wage employees the opportunity to work a full 40 hours a week. I suppose you could say that WalMart is a poster child for why this change in the law is a good thing: more jobs for more people. The problem I have with WalMart as a poster child for employment is because their workforce can't afford food, clothing and shelter in their towns.
And odd how that you compare the US to Cuba and North Korea even though it has never been like those other two countries even at the worst of times. Maybe you should read real history books.
You don't even need history books, visit rural Mississippi, North Dakota, and Arkansas outside of Little Rock. If you do go back in history, you'll come to my Grandparents in eastern Tennessee, whose lives in the 1920s did very much resemble life in rural Cuba today, but a bit colder in the winter.
False dilemma. There are actual problems such as pollution which we already regulate for. What I find particularly telling about this is that we don't have a problem which requires regulation. Instead, we have problems such as substantial barriers to entry for new businesses which come from too much regulation and other costs imposed on employers.
Interesting perspective. Talk with some underemployed families, especially lopsided earning families where the heavy earner has been unemployed a couple of times. I've been fortunate enough that my longest stretch of unemployment in the past 30 years has been 4 months, though to terminate that I was obliged to uproot the family and move 1200 miles - 4 months of job search yielded absolutely nothing within 400 miles of home - the jobs that were available looked at my resume and said "I'd hire you, but within a year or less you'll find something that pays twice as much, be a waste of my time to start you here."
I'm not going to say that the prick who laid off the whole company (30 people) the day before Christmas needs regulation to prevent him from doing that. I am going to say that businesses in the US have a distinct lack of respect for their workers when contrasted with more mature economies such as in Europe. You don't see German businesses pissing their pants afraid that taking a holiday or paying a decent wage is going to cause their economy to collapse.
The interesting thing about your perspective is that I've heard it before, from the mouths of the hardworking poor, people who can barely make ends meet to stay in a mobile home out in the boonies, afraid that if Obama was elected that their boss would get pissed off and fire everyone. I guess as long as business can cow the workers with threats like that and make them stick, we'll have elected representatives who back them up with labor un-friendly legislation.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @11:31PM
The OP is about requirement of increased compensation for overtime. The great conservative hue and cry is that prices will rise in response, yet, what at all in the law says that net take home pay has to rise?
Such interference always results in higher costs. But costs don't necessarily translate to higher take home pay.
You don't see German businesses pissing their pants afraid that taking a holiday or paying a decent wage is going to cause their economy to collapse.
You do however see companies in Germany and the rest of Europe optimizing for the fastest way to lay off people under regulatory constraints. For example, Agfa-Gevart N.V., a Belgian multi-national company closed an X ray film plant [blueridgenow.com] in North Carolina using a tactic of incremental layoffs (about half of the employees remaining a year) until the remaining employees fell below a certain threshold and then closing the plant. According to rumors I heard at the time, this was their standard approach for shutting down workplaces in Europe.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:48AM
You don't see German businesses pissing their pants afraid that taking a holiday or paying a decent wage is going to cause their economy to collapse.
You do however see companies in Germany and the rest of Europe optimizing for the fastest way to lay off people under regulatory constraints. For example, Agfa-Gevart N.V., a Belgian multi-national company closed an X ray film plant in North Carolina using a tactic of incremental layoffs (about half of the employees remaining a year) until the remaining employees fell below a certain threshold and then closing the plant. According to rumors I heard at the time, this was their standard approach for shutting down workplaces in Europe.
Nobody said Europeans are angels, especially when they deal with overseas operations - my favorite example was a French owned chemical plant in Seabrook, Texas - damned place looked like Mordor during the Hurricane Rita evac, billowing black smoke blocking the sun for miles. IBM in the Netherlands just laid off AlienBob, famous package maintainer, if you ever used Slackware.
Business is business all over the world, but comparatively speaking, I'd call German working conditions preferable to the Chinese, and I'd also say that it's not the brutal working conditions in China that are going to make them the next superpower, but instead their massive human resources and the fact that the world is becoming more connected and more service oriented, if their leadership can get out of the way of education, communication and international commerce, the Chinese population numbers are why they will be more influential in the future - same for India, though India seems even more chaotic and inconsistent than China at the moment.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 01 2016, @05:09PM
I'd call German working conditions preferable to the Chinese, and I'd also say that it's not the brutal working conditions in China that are going to make them the next superpower, but instead their massive human resources
Will German working conditions be preferable in 50 years? I'll note that China has been greatly improving its working conditions over the past few decades while Germany has been obsessing over climate change, concentrating power in the EU government, and other things hostile to maintaining good working conditions. My view is that working conditions reflect the state of the economy. A poor economy will have bad working conditions no matter how much you try to regulate the work environment.
China is doing what it takes, including said "brutal" working conditions, in order to have that good economy while Germany is not. I think the next few decades will be very instructive as to the relative value of economies to working conditions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 01 2016, @05:28PM
Will German working conditions be preferable in 50 years?
I'm going to start thinking like a Boomer on you here and say: "who cares what happens in 50 years, I'll be dead." Countries rise and fall and economies with them. As long as international borders stay somewhat open, if it gets bad enough where you are you can move to somewhere better.
I will note that Germany has been taking the short work week, long vacation thing seriously for the last 40+ years, and it hasn't had negative impact on them yet. They absorbed the East, basically printed them Trillions in hard currency upon entry, and 25 years later it still seems to be working for them. Peaches, cream and rose blossoms every day in every way? No. Better than here? My friend from college who emigrated there 25 years ago thought it was temporary, just a couple of years for work experience and to get to know his distant family better. When his wife moved there with him a couple of years later, they were coming back before the kids got into school because, well, the people are just weird over there, who wants kids like them? By 2000, they had realized that moving back to the US would be risking economic and quality of life suicide. Trading comfort and security in Germany for similar after tax compensation, a high risk of unemployment, and a sharp drop in social benefits was just too much for them. They stayed, their three kids are German now.
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