Why 10 million workers may benefit from Obama’s overtime push

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-10-million-workers-may-benefit-from-obamas-overtime-push/

Mar. 12, 2014

Anyone wearing an "assistant manager" name tag knows that the job carries a nice title but doesn't necessarily come with commensurate pay.

One of the biggest issues for assistant managers and other white-collar workers is unpaid overtime. That's because those employees are often expected to work 60 or 70 hours a week, pushing their pay down to minimum-wage level once all their hours are included.

With President Barack Obama's plan to require businesses to pay more in overtime wages to executive or managerial employees, as many as 10 million workers could stand to benefit, according to Ross Eisenbrey of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. That would happen if the White House, which hasn't yet set out the details of the plan, requires overtime pay for white-collar workers earning less than $50,000.

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Under current Labor Department rules, workers earning $455 per week, or about $24,000 per year, don't have to receive overtime pay beyond that threshold.

But the rule has become out-of-touch with reality, writes Eisenbrey, the former commissioner of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

"Back in the days when the level was regularly adjusted, it was set at about $50,000-$60,000 a year in today's dollars, which is reasonable and was high enough to protect most secretaries from being classified as exempt administrators, for example, and research assistants from being classified as exempt professionals," he noted.

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The current overtime rules are "hurting American workers and it harms our economy as a whole because working middle-class families don't have enough money to spend, and the lack of consumer demand is depressing job growth," she notes.

One thing is certainly true: Americans increasingly feel they're being pushed out of the middle class, partially because of stagnant wages. The number of Americans who say they're middle class -- considered the bedrock of the U.S. economy -- has shrunk to a low of 44 percent, down from 53 percent at the start of the 2008 recession, the Pew Research Center noted in January.

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