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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: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:06AM
They didn't care for anything they owned, not matter how nice, and expected others (government, local churches, etc) to do it for them.
This is likely an entrenched behaviour that is difficult to erase, but consider where it comes from: growing up not able to afford to own anything of value. I grew up in a fairly comfortable middle-class household with both parents working. This meant that I was conditioned from an early age to believe that things that we owned were the result of hard work and that they were worth looking after because they could only be replaced by more hard work, and replacing something would mean not being able to afford something else. Now consider the two extremes from this:
If you grow up in a household where you've inherited a large amount of wealth, it's difficult to value things because anything that you break can be easily replaced with no perceptible cost. There's no expectation that quality of life is tied to effort.
If you grow up in a household where there are no jobs available for your parents and you're reliant on government handouts, then you're going to be trained that anything that you own is given to you and that you're entitled to it. Other people are responsible for you and there's no point in working because there's no correlation between working and quality of life.
Just giving more stuff to people in this situation won't help get them out of poverty, you need to give them the opportunities to see benefits from the results of their labour. A big part of this is to ensure that the welfare system always rewards work: If you are able to work one hour a week, then you should be better off than someone who doesn't work. Historically, we've been very bad at this, which makes it very difficult to transition from surviving on handouts to actively contributing to society. UBI would help here: everyone gets a basic subsistence level income, irrespective of what they do, but any paid work increases take-home income.
sudo mod me up