Slashdot Mirror
Your Pay Is About To Go Up (gawker.com)
The Department of Labor's overtime rule is expected to be updated some time later this summer, and when it does, you will soon be entitled to overtime pay if you make less than $50,000 per year. According to Gawker, "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." How did they come to this conclusion? Gawker points out that the Department of Labor promotes a 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." Hamilton Nolan writes, "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."
Around where I live, $50K, including said overtime, is damn near poverty.
Take arbitrarily selected number, 40%.
Those above it: shove it
Those below it: take it
Reality is that most of unpaid overtime is done by faceless, nameless IT workers, project managers, accountants, office workers with the salary band of $50K to $100K.
If the pay for overtime is going to go up, that means it's less likely that a business will want you to work overtime.
That's kindof the point. The point of overtime law is to discourage companies from forcing people to work more than 40 hours per week. So I actually disagree with the headline. Likely people's pay is not going to go up significantly but rather many companies will hire more people to fill the gap. As a side benefit this should help unemployment. I work at a tech company and we pay everyone hourly. I think salaried is stupid and we should just do away with it. If they track your hours then you should automatically be hourly. If you don't set your own schedule then you should be hourly. If you can't leave at noon because things are slow then you should be hourly. If you don't have a set amount of tasks that once finished you can leave then you should be hourly. Most people shouldn't really be salaried. Nurses or anyone who has to be at their station a minimum number of hours shouldn't be salaried. Salaried should be reserved for the accountant that comes in, balances the books, and leaves or other such jobs where you can actually run out of work and go home early if you get done early.