Your Pay Is About to Go Up If You Make Less Than $50,000/Year

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36531-your-pay-is-about-to-go-up

We are referring here to the Department of Labor’s overtime rule, which is widely expected to be updated some time later this summer. Though we won’t have an official number until the rule is final, it now appears that even if you are a salaried employee or some sort of “manager,” you will still be entitled to time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours per week, as long as your total salary falls under the threshold. The DOL itself promotes this Wall Street Journal story which says that “ The threshold would be increased to $970, or $50,440 annually. That level is about the 40th percentile of weekly earnings for salaried workers.”

This rule has been a matter of political contention for years. But now that it is actually approaching, its import is becoming clear: overtime pay, which has long been isolated to a minority of workers, is about to be extended to almost the entire middle class. This is a very big fucking deal. Nick Hanauer, a billionaire activist who pushed for the rule change, told us last year that “The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.” The battle to raise the minimum wage has gotten more attention, but the battle to raise the overtime threshold could have a similar impact. One report estimates that nearly half of black or Hispanic workers or single mothers could see their pay newly increase thanks to the rule change.

If your employer doesn’t like it, they can either raise your pay over $50K, or stop asking you to work extremely long hours without overtime pay.

[Snarkoleptic]

1. Thanks Obama!

[Punx]

2. There's been a lot of abuse of "Exempt" status.

Over the last few decades. Calling someone a "supervisor", or "lead" even though they really don't have any true managerial authority or special technical expertise, and then expecting them to do the work or two or three people. Retail and fast food are famous for this.

And a lot of the lower end technical jobs like an accountant or a lower level IT person which is normally exempt could be affected depending on where in the country one lives and the company's salary structure.