Doesn't this require legislation? Executive power, cheered by the right under W, is out of control.

There's not much evidence to suggest that this law would result in any significant long term increase to working class wages. It could likely result in even more foreign investments. It's almost like the return on domestic investment is closely tied to one's ability to start or maintain a profitable business with employees paid according to market.

You seemed to have skipped a step, which is pretty common in these laisse faire discussion in that you jump right from the employee to the economy. That's not how a job works. The advantage is being able to work longer hours without pay. That without pay is meaningful because that lost wage isn't accruing to the employee, it's accruing to the employer. The employer is leveraging a worker's ability to work longer hours without pay into depressing wages and benefits for all workers. Requiring overtime be paid is merely making sure that if longer hours are actually required that they be compensated. The secondary benefit is that employers can no longer use longer hours without pay as leverage.

"You can count on me, because I'm not going anywhere!" is not advantageous sentence to the employee, it's advantageous to the employer. It maybe more risky for the employer to use resources on certain employees, but it's not like no one's going to be taught those skills or use those resources. In any case, being seen as 'stable' is or isn't an advantage isn't really relevant to the discussion.


Yea the standard laisse faire Econ 101 stuff. It's not really relevant because we aren't talking competition between industries as much as intrashop competition, and of course at the margins the executive order will make it more likely that employers hire more people.

I actually agree pretty much with suzzer, huehue, Elliot, and Obama on this. Interesting. Oh yeah, thanks Obama.

The class flattens the wages/salaries near the bottom. Those earning 40k a year now has an incentive to get training and become more productive instead of working overtime.

And the poorest working class now gets to get to a level of earning that's actually sustainable.

You make good points, I just wanted to clarify that I was referring to market for a specific type of work, not the entire work force. Demand can vary wildly depending on the job, and where the demand is there, you aren't going to see the eroding of vacation time and other benefits that you describe. And where the demand isn't there, I think a regulation like this will make it harder on those people.

I sense this is another example of why conservative right-wing Republicans so hate, despise and loathe President Obama. The business owners and employers who will be (adversely?) affected by this are probably thinking: "Damn our President! If we had a good Republican in the White House, this wouldn't be happening ..."

From a strictly objective viewpoint, looking solely at the numbers, this adjustment may not have that great an impact. A friend on another message board pointed out that only 3 percent of the [current] workforce fall within the group of workers who are not paid for hours worked in excess of 40 per week. If this adjustment will effect an estimated 5 million workers out of an overall workforce of (approximately) 140 million, that 3 percent number sounds about right. OTOH, I can see how employers and owners in certain businesses (like retail and fast food) will be hopping mad about this. I suppose we can throw a pity party for their misfortune ... (crying alligator tears ...)

Retail and fast food primarily pay hourly already as it is, and go way out of their way to hire enough people to keep hours under 40/week. It may affect their management, though. I don't it having a large effect on those industries either way tbh.

Assistant managers in retail and fast food are generally work a ton of hours for less than 50k. They will reap most of the benefit. I could see these places reducing the hours they are open in response.

Yes, they'll just hire more managers at reduced salaries. It won't change a thing really, except limiting assistant managers to 40/week. A few more people will be employed, but I suspect a lot of those managers would rather have just had the extra money they were making before the law was enacted.

They aren't limited to 40 hours a week.

No one is going to reduce salaries over this. People with jobs aren't going to take a paycut. So the going rate isn't going to drop. Labor costs will be a little higher which might come out in costs and *gasp* profits. Less people will be exploited by being hired for barely skilled jobs then thrust into work 50+ hr/week or lose your job expectations.

Productivity might actually go up anyway from less stressed over-worked workers with more free time for their families. We should be doing everything we can to improve quality of life for the average worker, not squeeze every last dime out of them until they drop dead of a heart attack at 62. I'm pretty sure the American economy can weather the economic shock of giving a few more workers reasonable hours.

The exact same arguments are bleated every time the min. wage goes up, and instead of tanking the economy usually seems to go up.

If an employer is forced to pay overtime to salary people, he's obviously going to adjust to that somehow. It's not just going to come out of his profits. If he can manage it, he will simply limit salary people to 40 hours and hire more people to pick up the slack, and pay them all a proportionally reduced salary. Why wouldn't he?

Obviously it wouldn't work like this every time, and probably not immediately, but that is where things would trend. We've already observed this with hourly-paid work. Every retail job I've had avoided working us over 40 hours like the plague. Places like wal-mart avoid avoid hiring full time people at all because it allows them to give fewer benefits and be subject to fewer workers rights regulations.

As I've said before in other threads - my work pays very well - but they also take advantage of developers by putting us onto projects which will fail if we don't work more than 40hrs/week. Sometimes a lot more.

If they had to pay us overtime, they would come up with much more reasonable about project estimates. Hell if we just had a rule where the manager had to be the last one to leave at night, and had to come in on Saturdays with us - all that **** would immediately stop.

My company makes like $30k/minute. They would survive I promise you. The level of value they get from a good web developer, as well-paid as we are, is still much much higher than what they pay us. They could absorb the shock.

Think of my large profitable company as a micorcosm for the US economy. If some small business can't get by w/o exploiting their workers - maybe they don't have a very good business to begin with.

Right so if they want to have someone work for more than 40 hours they have to pay them for the extra time instead of calling them a 'supervisor' and then not paying them for working more than 40 hours.

Even your large successful company will find a way to min-max all of the parameters so they continue make stupendous profits. Weak **** like this regulation will not even break their stride. It's just too easy to avoid paying the overtime with a slightly different strategy.

Right - which means I wouldn't have to work as much OT - which I don't get paid for anyway.

I do agree that if companies had to pay developers OT, salaries might go down some, given the insane amount of free hours a lot of us work for our companies. But some companies get by just fine working their devs 40 hours/week and they still have to compete on salary. So it can be done. Maybe instead of insanely profitable they're just wildly profitable. Think of it as a form of employee profit-sharing.

I'd be ok with making less and having more time off. Especially if I could get Euro-style 4-5 weeks of vacation. I can almost guarantee you on the whole year I'd be just as productive due to less burn out.

But they will avoid doing that. You are just mandating lower wages and more free time onto the managers, in spite of their desires. I agree with a lot of your points, but the one I really think you're getting wrong is the idea that the salary people aren't paid for the hours over 40 that are worked. They are paid, because it's implied in the contract that they work those hours. As I said earlier in the thread, these salary jobs are often highly-sought-after, people know they will be expected to work more than 40 hours and the salary is calculated with that in mind.

1. Many people would rather make more money. Probably most people, particularly those who are financially insecure.

2. Successful businesses are often so because they are acutely aware how to maximize productivity for minimal cost. I kind of think they tend to be ahead you on the importance of morale as it factors into this. If they are not, it seems like you should start a company right away, grab all of these unhappy burnouts, pay them more OT, give them 4 weeks of vacation and watch your competitors crumble in your wake.

1. Yes but again you're assuming there's going to be some immediate drop in salary which will price this in. Salaries are determined by the market. A lot of employers don't overwork their workers. So they won't need to drop salaries. The places that did overwork their workers still have to compete for new hires. What I see is a big drop of people getting hired under false pretenses. It's not like these 50-60hr/week places spell that out in the job interview.

2. If I started a company I would definitely give more vacation time. Germany gives 4-5 weeks minimum and their economy does fine. It's more about the culture than some maximizing productivity thing. In Asia they hardly get any vacation time. We still compete with them.

Possibly. I still contend that the overworked and not overworked people amount to differently-traded entities that should not be considered side by side. I don't believe the drop would be immediate. That's why I said in my first post in this thread that laws like this tend to help people in established careers at the expense of everyone else. It is likely that many people would be "grandfathered" into the new paradigm, while new hires would be subject to the lowered salaries and expectations.

The the other half of the Obama administration push is to examine the fraudulent use of supervisory positions to cheat people out of extra hours by claiming they were exempt then they were doing the same duties as the front line people.

Isn't most if the classification issues resolved with the increase in salary limit?

Somewhat, but from what I understand there were some white collar exceptions to even the low threshold that companies were playing loose with to get employees under the threshold to be exempt.

The exempt/non exempt classification distinctions for clerical versus professional work is a bit arbitrary.