Posted on 05/20/2016 11:47:20 AM PDT by reaganaut1
With a broad new class of workers becoming eligible for overtime, many small businesses are scrambling to figure out how to factor the regulations into their bottom line.
The Obama administration on Wednesday announced the final details of new labor rules to increase the salary cutoff for overtime pay. Although the plan was outlined a year ago and employers have several months to comply, many say the change will be a challenge to small businesses that pride themselves on a scrappy, entrepreneurial culture.
“We are pretty flexible,” said Kelli Glasser, who is president and chief executive of Exhibit Concepts, a 100-employee company in Dayton, Ohio, that designs, builds and manages exhibits for museums and trade shows. “ If somebody needs to pick up a sick kid or go to a doctor’s appointment, we let them do it because we know that at some point they’ll make up for it. Once you start tracking hours, that all changes.”
Currently, salaried employees who earn more than $23,660 a year and meet other criteria are not entitled by law to overtime pay, which is 1.5 times an equivalent hourly wage after an employee works more than 40 hours a week.
The threshold is scheduled to roughly double, to $47,476, on Dec. 1. That means millions of workers who were salaried will have to have their hours tracked to see if they qualify for overtime pay.
Employers will have various options. They could change the pay structure for employees making less than the new threshold to an hourly rate. They could raise the pay above the threshold so they won’t need to worry about overtime. They could even cut the base salaries of those who regularly work more than 40 hours, in expectation that overtime pay will make up the difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That will bring back unions like you wouldn’t believe.
You mean let people make their own decisions? What a novel idea!
Yeah, like the whole silly thing about prostitution being illegal.
I mean, you have a buyer, and you have a willing seller willing to offer services, no? A free-market transaction. No need for the government to get involved.
The article mentions now hours for salaried folks will need to be tracked. I’ve never been on a job where hours were not tracked and in IT, they are meticulously tracked for billing and such. Is that everyone else’s experience as well?
Why doesn’t the President and his executive branch simply declare by edict what everybody’s pay is, and get it over with.
We are nibbling at the edges of something which should have been stomped to the ground long ago. Presidents have zero power to declare anything whatsoever about wages.
And by the way, neither does Congress.
If they could figure out how to enforce reporting income from that illegal activity so they could collect taxes, they would probably legalize in a minute.
>I’ve never been on a job where hours were not tracked and in IT
In 30+ years I’ve never see IT hours tracked for employees doing work for the hiring company (e.g. not working on a contract for another company). They are tracked when working on contracts for another company. If it’s contract work they are tracked carefully.
As an independent contractor now I benefit from these rules/regulations. The harder it is to hire (and fire) a full-time employee the more likely I get the work for a lot more than an employee’s salary. And being independent I don’t have someone taking 20-50% of that. Between the government and the attitude of many recent college grads it’s a good time to be an independent IT contractor. Most grads are good but there’s still a good risk that you get a poor attitude or lucky to have 25 hours of actual work when they are “in the office” for 40 hours a week. And even the best grads have 5-10 hours a week of internet, personal calls, lunch, etc. And many of them “know more” than the experts at their job and the business and the business doesn’t get what it’s wants/needs.
If your work is billed to clients.
I had to start punching a clock again a few months back.
Haven’t done that for 25 years.
I agree with DonaldC, that would boost unions. The history is that employers worked employees abusive hours.
The real problem is that you can’t have wage and labor laws, social programs, environment laws, worker safety laws, and free trade with countries that don’t have similar laws.
We need to restore the import tariffs before we provide even more incentive for companies to go overseas.
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