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Mon 23 Aug, 2004 10:11 am
Am I missing something the government changes work rules and has no Idea what the effect will be or do they?. Who will gain who will lose? Who will benefit the employer or employee? As usual it appears that this administration operates with it's eyes tightly closed. Any opinion?Groups differ on impact of overtime rules
Posted: Monday, August 23, 7:50am EDT
Paychecks could surge or shrink for a few or for millions of workers across the country starting Monday, when sweeping changes to the nation's overtime pay rules take effect. There is little agreement by the Bush administration, employer groups, labor experts and others on how many workers will gain or lose the right to overtime pay under the new rules in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
"To be candid, no one knows," said Jerry Hunter, a labor lawyer at Bryan Cave LLP in St. Louis and former general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board during the first Bush administration.
Employers have sought changes for decades, complaining the regulations were ambiguous and out of date, and questioning why highly paid professionals should get overtime pay. Labor unions, however, say the new rules are intended to reduce employers' costs by cutting the number workers who are eligible for overtime pay.
Estimates of how many workers will lose their overtime eligibility range from 107,000 to 6 million. Workers who could become newly eligible range from very few to 1.3 million.
"Not only is the Labor Department unsure, but a lot of people in a lot of industries are unsure," Hunter said. "This is all very fluid right now."
The major overhaul, the first in more than half a century, is aimed at mostly white-collar workers. The Labor Department says manual laborers and other blue-collar workers will not be affected.
The new rules are intended to limit workers' multimillion-dollar lawsuits, many of them successful, claiming they were cheated out of overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week.
New York Times editorial
Saving Time-and-a-Half
Published: August 25, 2004
There is no doubt the nature of America's work force has changed a great deal since the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but the Bush administration has cynically relied on this fact to overhaul the law's overtime provisions in a manner most likely to hurt millions of Americans. At a time of stagnant wages and a weak labor market - when workers need more security, not less - fewer people are likely to receive overtime pay when they put in more than 40 hours a week on the job.
That is because new rules that went into effect this week take an expansive view of the nation's managerial class, which is ineligible for overtime pay. If you are a factory employee or a retail store supervisor who leads a small team of fellow workers, for instance, the new rules deny you overtime if you can merely recommend - not carry out - the hiring and firing of employees.
Business groups want the new rules because they say they need to cut down on the litigation-inducing uncertainty of who is eligible for overtime. But the Bush administration could have provided more clarity without necessarily stacking the deck against working Americans. The administration goes so far as to say that its changes will expand the pool of people eligible for overtime, but research by liberal and labor advocates persuasively argue that the changes would cut the number, by as many as 6 million.
The administration should have held off until the true impact of its rules could have been ascertained. But then, the White House haste might have stemmed from its desire to shield major companies from litigation. Of late, several have been hammered by a barrage of lawsuits demanding unpaid overtime, including a $90 million verdict against Farmers Insurance Exchange and multimillion settlements by Rite Aid, Bank of America and Radio Shack.
When Congress returns from recess, it should override these rules and draft legislation that updates the 1938 law in a way that does not hurt hardworking Americans who struggle, as supervisors or not, to get by, hour by hour.
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