OVERTIME
Josh Marshall, not surprisingly, opposes the Administration’s move to make more “white collar” employees “exempt” from the requirement to pay overtime. Frankly, I don’t have strong feelings on this one. On the one hand, I tend to oppose governmental regulation of wages and prices because it skews the market, often in ways that are unhelpful to those ostensibly helped by the law. On the other, if we’re going to have a law saying non-professionals who work more than 40 hours a week are entitled to extra pay, I see no reason why some low paid workers should be excluded and others not.
I’ve yet to see a clear explanation of the proposal. As someone who’d potentially be affected (I have an exempt position based on my job title, but it’s part-time), I’d like a clear explanation of what’s going on here. Since the exempt/non-exempt distinction is also widely used as the “professional”/non-professional dividing line, and since I’m never going to see overtime pay in my current position anyway, I’d rather stay exempt and not have to deal with timecards.
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