Republicans Go After That Great Enemy of Freedom: Overtime Pay

The Obama administration significantly expanded the salary ceiling for overtime pay. This is of course a total outrage to those freedom-loving Republicans who see the impoverishment of the working and middle classes as a just end.

As the Department of Labor’s (DOL’s) overtime rule hurtles toward finalization, advancing to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) March 14, House and Senate Republicans stepped in and introduced legislation March 17 calling for the rule to be stopped in its tracks.

“This mandate on employers will hurt the lowest paid American workers the most, by reducing their opportunities for a promotion or a better job and making it all but impossible for workers to negotiate flexible schedules,” said Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., when introducing the bill. Alexander said small independent colleges in Tennessee estimate the rule would cost each of their schools a minimum of $1.3 million—“a giant figure that may cost the colleges’ students in tuition hikes and cost employees in job cuts.”

As proposed, the rule recommended setting the salary threshold for exempt employees at $50,440 annually, up 113 percent from the current $23,660 annually. It also called for annual automatic increases to the salary threshold and suggested that the duties tests might be made more stringent, requiring managers to spend at least half of their time on managerial functions.

Bill’s Proposals

The Protecting Workplace Advancement and Opportunity Act (S. 2707 and H.R. 4773) would:

Nullify the proposed rule.
Require the DOL to first conduct a comprehensive economic analysis on the impact of mandatory overtime expansion to small businesses, nonprofit organizations and public employers.
Prohibit automatic increases in the salary threshold.
Require that any future changes to the duties test must be subject to notice and comment.

The legislation “provides a clear vehicle to push back on the overtime rule,” said Lisa Horn, a spokeswoman for Partnership to Protect Workplace Opportunity (PPWO) and director of congressional affairs with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). “Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed concerns about the unintended consequences of this rule, and this bill provides a reasonable approach to updating the overtime rules in a way that that works for both employers and employees.” The PPWO is a group of more than 60 employer organizations and companies representing the broad employer community’s response to the proposed overtime rule changes.

Some Democrats might have expressed some questions about it. But of course this proposed bill has zero Democratic support.