By Rachel Goldfarb, originally published on Next New Deal
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Whatever Happened to Overtime? (Politico Magazine)
Nick Hanauer says that raising the earnings threshold for mandatory overtime pay would kickstart the economy by either ensuring workers have more money or forcing companies to hire more workers.
So what’s changed since the 1960s and '70s? Overtime pay, in part. Your parents got a lot of it, and you don’t. And it turns out that fair overtime standards are to the middle class what the minimum wage is to low-income workers: not everything, but an indispensable labor protection that is absolutely essential to creating a broad and thriving middle class. In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay—the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime—has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime. You know many people like that? Probably not. By 2013, just 11 percent of salaried workers qualified for overtime pay, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute. And so business owners like me have been able to make the other 89 percent of you work unlimited overtime hours for no additional pay at all.
Follow below the fold for more.
Can Republicans Shut Down the Government Without Actually Shutting Down the Government? (WaPo)
Paul Waldman explains the GOP plan to stop any executive action on immigration without shutting down the government. The strategy: to pass spending bills that exclude the offices that would work on that issue.
Over Bentley's Objections, Golden Dragon Plant Votes for Union (Montgomery Advisor)
The Republican governor of Alabama urged workers at a copper plant to vote against unionizing with a letter distributed directly to the plant workers shortly before they voted in favor of their union.
Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions (NYT)
Thomas Edsall points out that while Republicans demonize unions, and public sector unions in particular, the Democrats aren't doing much of anything to push back on labor's behalf.
When Mega Corporations Get Mega Tax Breaks, We All Pay (The Nation)
Katrina vanden Heuvel, a member of the Roosevelt Institute's board of directors, says that closing corporate income tax loopholes could fund incredible projects, like national universal pre-K.
Here's Why Conservatives Will Never Give Up Their War on Obamacare (TNR)
The "partisan incomprehension" that follows the Affordable Care Act around in the news is primarily based in the fact that Republicans lost a highly partisan fight, writes Brian Beutler.