NY Times: Gaming Overtime

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Gaming Overtime

Some ominous fine print has turned up in the Bush administration's promise to help long-suffering low-wage workers get the overtime pay they have long been denied. As initially presented, the White House estimated that its new rules governing nonunion workers would mean $895 million in guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for 1.3 million of the nation's poorest-paid workers. That inviting proposal was coupled with a far more controversial plan to allow employers greater leeway to close out overtime pay for a midrange of white-collar professionals by designating them as managers.

That part was questionable enough — critics warned that it could cut earnings and force unpaid overtime on millions of workers, and even the Republican-led Congress became leery. But now, in delving into the sweetener half of the plan covering the lowest-paid, The Associated Press has discovered that the Labor Department's advisory includes suggestions to employers about ways they can keep their costs from actually going up.

One tip from those helpful bureaucrats theoretically protecting struggling breadwinners is that an employer could consider "the most cost-effective compensation adjustment method." This translates into cutting a worker's hourly wage so the new overtime requirement will produce the old net salary, not an actual boon.

To be fair, the Labor Department also suggests that employers are free to raise workers' salaries to the new higher threshold of $22,100 a year, the level at which eligibility for time and a half ends. Still, those helpful hints to anxious employers only compound suspicions about the plan.

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Gaming Overtime

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