just curious has anyone been affected yet by pres. Bush's cut in overtime pay and the elimination of the 40 hour work week?
I dont see how that can be. I believe those are state laws and therefore cannot be changed by the president.
Unless he is chaging how overtime affects social security (which I know he was speaking of, I've yet to see the SOTU speech).
I'm interested to see what this is about.
Here is one side of the story.
June 3, 2004
As the weather has heated up over the past few months, so has the political rhetoric about the Bush administration's record on behalf of American workers. However, the overheated rhetoric just doesn't match up with reality, which is that workers are safer, more financially secure and receiving more helpful job training assistance than before.
One example of this administration's commitment to protecting workers is its new Overtime Security rules. The new rules update 50-year-old regulations that no longer effectively guarantee workers' overtime rights. The revised rules dramatically expand the number of workers who can get overtime by nearly tripling the minimum salary threshold for automatic overtime eligibility. This strengthens overtime protection for 6.7 million workers, including 1.3 million workers who were denied overtime coverage in the past.
We also added new sections that explicitly guarantee - for the first time ever - that "blue-collar" workers, police officers, fire fighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and licensed practical nurses are entitled to overtime protection. The new rules also ensure that union members and veterans who are entitled to overtime now are protected in the future as well.
Another way the administration is helping workers is by getting more federal job training dollars into the hands of workers themselves - so they can make their own decisions about the services they need and the career options they want to pursue. On top of the $80 million that the administration provides Iowa every year for training, employment and unemployment services, we have provided more than $15.4 million in additional national emergency grants that help workers and their communities respond to changes in the economy.
President Bush is also pursuing major reforms to federal worker training programs - to double the number of workers who get job training assistance and to close the skills gap so that we can fill every high-growth job with a well-trained American worker.
The president's High Growth Job Training Initiative is already connecting thousands of workers to value-added job training that will lead to good-paying, long-term career opportunities.
The most underreported story about this administration is its proven record of accomplishment on protecting workers' safety and rights more effectively than ever before. Enforcement is up, penalties against unscrupulous employers are up, recoveries of back wages and employee benefits are up, and workers are safer and healthier. Here are some of the results:
Workplace injury, illness and fatality rates are at an all-time low, and the number of inspections, citations and cases brought by OSHA continue to climb each year.
Total back wages, including overtime pay, collected by the department's Wage and Hour Division on behalf of workers jumped to an 11-year high, up 21 percent to $212.5 million in 2003.
The department recovered a record-breaking $1.4 billion in employee benefits for workers this year - a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
This administration's record of strengthening overtime security rules, reforming job training and aggressively enforcing federal worker protection laws is making life better for American workers. Now that the economy is recovering, and we have created 1.1 million new jobs in just the last eight months, we will continue to focus on making the American work force the best, safest, healthiest and most productive in the world.
ELAINE L. CHAO is U.S. secretary of labor.
here is another, oh yeah one more thing how about pres. Bush's plan to give tax incentives for american company's to send work overseas like india and china?
"Politicians are wanted, not in council but in action!" wrote Ira Steward in 1865. Steward, a Boston machinist and trade unionist, played a vital role in organizing laborers of all types to press government for shorter working hours during the late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, most American workers labored eight hours a day thanks to decades of economic and political pressure to bring about reform.
The ultimate result of Steward's political strategy was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). This law, which included a ban on goods produced by child labor in commerce and the first federal minimum wage, ultimately required employers to pay most employees time and a half for work over forty hours per week.
By establishing maximum hours and minimum wages, Congress had one idea in mind: to put money in the hands of workers during a Depression so that they could spend more. As Franklin Roosevelt explained when pushing for the passage of this legislation: "What does the country ultimately gain if we encourage businessmen to enlarge the capacity of American industry to produce unless we see to it that the income of our working population actually expands sufficiently to create markets to absorb that increased production?"
Today, we face another economic downturn. Yet in direct contradiction to the principles George W. Bush expressed to rally support for his tax cuts, this president is determined to take money out of the pockets of millions of working and middle-class people by ending their right to overtime pay. In March of this year, the Labor Department proposed a series of rule changes concerning who is eligible for overtime. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), these changes would adversely affect eight million workers by allowing employers to extend their working day without granting overtime compensation.
Seventy-nine percent of American workers were eligible for overtime pay in 1999, explains EPI. Under the existing law, employees with "executive" and "administrative" functions are not eligible. However, under the Bush administration's new rules many employees would be reclassified to fit these categories without having their duties change.
For example, "[E]ducation levels required to be considered a professional or administrative employee are diluted" by these changes, write Ross Eisenbrey and Jared Bernstein for EPI, thereby "allowing employers to deny overtime pay to paralegals, emergency medical technicians, licensed practical nurses, draftsmen, surveyors, and many others who currently have the law's protection."
Exempt professionals will also now include anybody who learned their skills in the military. This provision led the BBC journalist Greg Palast to remark, " I just can't understand why Bush didn't announce that one when he landed on the aircraft carrier." Furthermore, all employees who make over $65,000 a year would be automatically exempt from coverage.
Granted, the new changes do open up the possibility of overtime pay for more people at the lower end of the income scale. However, EPI concludes that many more workers will lose overtime eligibility than gain it under these proposed rules. Also, this assumes that low-income workers can get the overtime to which they are entitled. Recent lawsuits against Wal-Mart and Cracker Barrel by workers denied overtime compensation by these employers suggest the problem with that assumption.
In the short term, by cutting the take home pay for reclassified workers, these rules will dampen spending by middle to high-income workers. That spending is essential to keeping the nascent economic rebound going. As the historian Lizabeth Cohen recently explained in the Denver Post , "If we are indeed moving out of the recession of the last couple of years, it hardly needs repeating that consumer spending has been and continues to be the key to that recovery."
From a long-term economic standpoint, one might argue that employers need these changes in order to be more flexible in how they utilize labor so that they can remain competitive in the global economy. But this is not what the Bush administration did. Recognizing the unpopularity of redistributing money from workers to businesses, the Labor Department quietly announced these reforms on page 15,576 of the Federal Register.
Eventually, the administration defended this proposal by arguing that overtime rules were out of date despite, as the Economic Policy Institute suggests, the fact that they have been reviewed by Congress at least three times since 1985. In reality, the Bush administration knew that most Americans think that ten and twelve hour days should be a thing of the past and it didn't want to let the president's desire to turn back the clock become widely known.
Congress, recognizing the best interests of the majority of its constituents, approved language that would have blocked the implementation of these rules as part of the omnibus spending bill that funds most federal government operations. Despite this response, President Bush threatened to shut down the whole government unless the language blocking the overtime changes was excluded. In the face of this threat, moderate Republicans who opposed Bush's plan, such as Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, backed down.
Even though the Republican-led House of Representatives has passed this spending bill without blocking overtime changes, Democrats have managed to delay its consideration in the Senate until January. The Democrats' problem with the bill is not just how it treats overtime, but the enormous amount of pork-barrel spending and unwise budget cuts contained therein.
Even if this bill passes without overtime protection (and that seems likely at this point), Democrats should not drop this issue. As the work day expands, many Americans will wake up to the fact that George W. Bush is not acting in their best interests, assuming Democrats and the media take the trouble to remind them. It is then that workers will likely follow Ira Steward's advice and look to see which elected officials acted on their behalf when it really counted.
ericphilbin, what this is about is the presidents reform of overtime pay and the elimination of the 40 hour work week, basically what he has one is give employers more latitude in denying overtime pay, yeah they talk about raising the threshold to 23000.00 fro overtime pay up from 13000.00 but what they are not telling you is they can still disqaulify that person from overtime if he is a supervisor or assistant supervisor or a team leader well go into any fast food joint and count the number of team leaders and such. but what it does do is strip overtime from people who make 60 -100+ thousand this is where big buisness can really feel the impact, also he iliminated the 40 hour work week employers now can schedule up to 70 hrs a week with no overtime pay
i am amazed at the number of people who don't know this but then again the pres snuck this one thru during the begining of the war even despite sen harkin's amendment which would have reformed the overtime in a way that would have added people and fixed some of the obsolete wording without jeopordizing the 40 hour work week.
ericphilbin, what this is about is the presidents reform of overtime pay and the elimination of the 40 hour work week, basically what he has one is give employers more latitude in denying overtime pay, yeah they talk about raising the threshold to 23000.00 fro overtime pay up from 13000.00 but what they are not telling you is they can still disqaulify that person from overtime if he is a supervisor or assistant supervisor or a team leader well go into any fast food joint and count the number of team leaders and such. but what it does do is strip overtime from people who make 60 -100+ thousand this is where big buisness can really feel the impact, also he iliminated the 40 hour work week employers now can schedule up to 70 hrs a week with no overtime pay
i am amazed at the number of people who don't know this but then again the pres snuck this one thru during the begining of the war even despite sen harkin's amendment which would have reformed the overtime in a way that would have added people and fixed some of the obsolete wording without jeopordizing the 40 hour work week.
That just is not true. An employer cannot "disqualify" someone making 23k and below no matter what they do, 23k and below must be paid overtime for hours more than 40 in a work week. Also they can't just give them a title of "supervisor" and not pay overtime. The employee must meet a certain criterior to be qualified for an overtime exemption, most of which have probably been on salary in the past anyway.
Personally this is not affected me since I am paid a salary and have been for the past 7 years, how did this affect you?
It's no secret that I am not the biggest fan of this Pres, and I can see how he may like to help certain businesses (although, he is DEF not the only president to do so). I would really have to see proof that this is going on. I simply cannot believe that the federal government could have this kind of say. This is precisely the type of thing that should be left up to the state government.
Sleekster, if you could point me in the direction of some articles that you've gotten your info from, I'd like to see what is going on.
It's no secret that I am not the biggest fan of this Pres, and I can see how he may like to help certain businesses (although, he is DEF not the only president to do so). I would really have to see proof that this is going on. I simply cannot believe that the federal government could have this kind of say. This is precisely the type of thing that should be left up to the state government.
Sleekster, if you could point me in the direction of some articles that you've gotten your info from, I'd like to see what is going on.
Why not just look at the Labor Departments website since thats who actually dictates the laws. :notam:
it's all a wash people, the more companies pay their employees the more they will have to charge the consumer for goods and services, so youre really wasting your time worrying about nothing... :eat:
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