Would you have benefited from this change? All it does is raise the salary threshold where you would have been converted to an hourly worker so you could be paid overtime.
In today's dollars, it was raised from $23,660 to $47,476. Would that have affected you?
There are also a lot of non-managerial job roles that are exempted. I won't go through all of them, but you can find it here:
https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/
I haven't collected overtime pay since I was in high school. But, I worked far more than 40 hours a week, and I was never a manager. But, I was compensated fairly and I was never laid off, despite multiple rounds of layoffs throughout my career.
Yes, I would absolutely have benefitted from this change.
I would have either gotten overtime pay (frankly I think it unlikely I would have gotten much), OR they would have cut my work week back to a more reasonable number of hours.
As I was married with a young family (baby + one on the way) that time would have been invaluable.
And some young people would have gotten part-time jobs because the company would have had no choice but to add some payroll to get the stocking and sweeping done that I was no longer doing for free.
Would my job be eliminated? Not likely. Someone had to show up every day with a key and open the door.
Abusing my exempt status allowed upper management to shave a minimal amount off of store payroll, which allowed them to qualify for their huge quarterly bonus. It is that kind of thinking, quarter after quarter, year after year, chain after chain....that creates political conditions resulting in government doing this.