By
There is good news for hard working Americans coming next
month. Of course, now that Donald Trump has been elected president, the
landscape has changed, and that good news may not last very long.
Welcome pay boost
On December 1, 2016, a
new Labor Department regulation goes into effect requiring employers of most
salaried workers earning up to $47,476 a year to receive time-and-a-half
overtime pay when they work more than forty hours during a week.
Currently people making
salaries of more than $23,660 are not eligible for overtime. Raising the cutoff
means an additional four million workers will soon be entitled to overtime, in
addition to the nine million who already are entitled to it.
The regulation was pushed
through by the Obama Administration to help the middle class. Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr. said this was an important issue for President Obama –
fairness for working Americans. “The middle class is getting clobbered,” Mr.
Biden said. “If you work overtime, you should actually get paid for working
overtime.” He added that 60 percent of salaried workers qualified for overtime
in 1975 based on their salaries, but only 7 percent qualified today.
Making it work
Some employers opposed
this new regulation, saying that it could cost billions of dollars and would
undermine the morale of salaried employees by requiring them to account for
every hour of their workdays.
Certain categories of
workers, like teachers, doctors and outside sales representatives, continue to
be exempt from the regulation, though academics primarily engaged in research
are not.
Americans work hard. We
work more hours annually than our counterparts in other developed countries.
Companies benefit from all that labor, and the employees should be compensated
for it. This is a positive step forward, reflecting basic decency and fairness
in the workplace.
Will a President Trump
keep these hard-won benefits? The new regulations may become an early test for
whether Trump remains true to his middle-class base, or embraces the
standard pro-business (and thus, often anti-worker) policies of the Republican
Party he now unquestionably leads.
The views and opinions expressed here
are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Avvo.
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