You'd think the Labor department was about helping workers, at least in an election year. But not this one. The Dept. is preparing new rules which will no longer require that employers pay millions of higher-paid employees overtime; in the future, however, 1.3 million low-paid employees (paid under $22.1K per year) who are not covered by the current overtime requirement will have to get time and half if they work over 40 hours. In a combination of chutzpah and political ham-handedness, the Bush Labor department is explaining to employers how, they can evade this new rule in order to keep down their lowest-paid workers' pay packets: they could, for example, cut hourly wages, so that with the overtime the total pay remains the same.
The AP story explaining this was in the Miami Herald, but doesn't seem to have made either the NYT or the Washington Post. It contains the most bald-faced denials of reality by a press spokesman, one Ed Frank, I've seen for a long time: Despite publishing instructions on how to avoid paying workers extra for overtime, “We're not saying anybody should do any of this.” Right. We're just explaining their options to them very carefully. Let's nominate Mr. Frank for a Ron Ziegler Award. [Sadly, Tammy McCutchen can't be included among the nominees, because she's an administrator, not a press secretary. Even though she's the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division administrator who said that making a “payroll adjustment” which lowers hourly wages but keeps the total including overtime constant, one that results “in virtually no, or only a minimal increase in labor costs,” is not a pay cut.]
In fairness, I should note that the Labor Dept. also lists raising base salary above the threshold as another way to avoid paying overtime (although for workers near the cap, this 'raise' may paradoxically reduce their total takehome when they are required to do substantial ovetime).
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