Posted on 10/27/2016 4:31:51 PM PDT by JennysCool
Texas and 20 other states have announced a lawsuit to block the Obama administration’s destructive overtime rules, which are slated to go into effect December 1, 2016. With less than 3-months to spare, victory in the case would save businesses and workers across the U.S. from this dehumanizing and economically damaging law.
According to the new rule, salaried workers earning below $47,476 per year must be paid time-and-a-half for work done in excess of forty hours per week. This is up from a previous salary threshold of $23,660. The rule promises more pay for working long hours, more money for lower-income employees and struggling families, and fewer hours for the same pay! Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Unfortunately, that isn’t how it will work out in reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
What also needs to be stopped is the ability of DC to govern the states through the wielding of bureaucratic fiat.
No more entry level computer programmers then. One more industry chased completely off shore.
And you all thought it was happening because of free trade.
There will be a lot of people making $47,477.00 working 60 - 80 hour weeks.
Rush, Hannity, Ingraham and others need to be talking about this relentlessly. It’s got both employers and employees up in arms.
If you want to see a whole bunch of convoluted BS, be sure to check out the Department of Labor’s Q & A:
https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/faq.htm#G5
Secede already, Texas. There’s no obligation for states to be lorded over by the feds. In fact, states created the feds anyway purely for foreign affairs and having a monetary and trade system in place. If the Feds were to return to their original purpose, there would be no national debt, no poverty, and no Democrats in office.
Congress gave all those bureaucracies their power. They could take it away but they won’t.
Damn close to entry engineers straight out of college I’ve been hiring over the past 6 years. And some of those in other companies and industries would be impacted as well.
There is a reason why the GOP is the stupid party. The people who put in 40+ hours are OUR people. Working hard to get ahead. Every one of them was won over by Obama. Big business objects. WHO THE HELL do you think big business(higher ups) support? Go ahead. Stand on principle. We don’t stand for rewarding hard work anymore. The retail store workers have only the rats to thank on Thanksgiving day.
The rule makes sense if the minimum wage (which I oppose in its entirety) is $15 an hour. Then that $47k floor represents a 60 hour week on $15 an hour.
Think of it as a cost of living adjustment and it makes sense.
The abuse it prevents is when an employer puts someone on salary at (say) $45k per year and calls them exempt so they work the person 60 hours a week and by doing so save $2k on the minimum wage.
Like I said, I oppose the min wage. But if you’re going to have one then you also have to prohibit a path for employers to evade it.
When I started work in the 80s I decided to work at least 45 hours/week (5 more hours than my peers) to “get ahead”. I got promoted very quick (fastest ever in the company’s 20+ year history). Sounds like I couldn’t do that now.
When I was a senior architect for a fortune 100 company, with 100s of developers under me on projects, I had to use contract agencies for development and system administration. We could not hire in-house resources because of government regulations. We used contract agencies because they dealt with the regulations. I could not use some GREAT agencies because the were under 50 people and didn’t follow all of the regulations that my company had to follow - mainly reporting that small businesses are exempt from but keep them from getting big contracts (or getting the contracts renewed once legal finds out). Lawyers said we’d be accused of bypassing regulations by hiring them. So we used “big companies” to do our development and sysadmin and they mostly used H-1B and offshore developers. And we paid MORE for agencies paying their developers almost nothing than we’d pay our own developers. But it was worth it to not need to deal with regulations. We weren’t bypassing regulations - we paid more and made sure regs were followed by contractors. And legal residents did not get hired because of it.
I’m independent now and have the work to hire 5+ people tomorrow but I don’t want the trouble. I had up to 4 employees in the 90s. It wasn’t “fun”, but was reasonable. At this point it’s not worth the effort if I only want a few employees. One of my clients uses an agency hiring H-1Bs to do what my employees could do better for less cost to the client. I could have 2-3 US citizens working for them TOMORROW if I was motivated.
We have too many people in government who are clueless about business. I’ll forgive ANYTHING Trump SAYS to get someone in DC who knows what business is like. It’s not a fault that he “has his ties made in China”. It’s a reality caused by government, that he understands better than anyone who blames him for it. If we want jobs in the US, get rid of regulations like this overtime rule that sound good but in reality cost jobs.
The corrupt, post-17th Amenndment ratification Congess has always had the constitutional authority to put a stop to a president’s actions, but has stubbornly refused to do so with Obama.
From related threads …
In fact, regardless what FDR’s state sovereignty-ignoring, activist justices wanted everybody to think about the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers (1.8.3), a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate INTRAstate commerce.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Such justices had also clarified that powers that the states haven’t expressly delegated to the feds, Obama’s unconstitutional interference with intrastate overtime wages in this example, are prohibited to the feds.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
So Obama is once again allowing Congress to use him as its “useful idiot,” lawmakers letting Obama get away with stealing 10th Amendment-protected state powers to do the unconstitutional things that corrupt lawmakers probably want to do.
By letting lawless, last-term Obama do their dirty work for them, lawmakers are able to keep their voting records clean so that they can fool low-information patriots, patriots who are clueless about the fed’s constitutionally limited powers, into reelecting them. (Patriots need to iron the wrinkles out of the 22nd Amendment.)
Remember in November !
Patriots need to support Trump / Pence by also electing a new, state sovereignty-respecting Congress that will not only work within its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers to support Trump’s vision for making America great again for everybody, but will also put a stop to unconstitutonal federal taxes and likewise unconstitutional inteference in state affairs as evideced by Obama's unconstitutional regulation of intrastate wages.
Note that such a Congress will also probably be willing to fire state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices.
The rule prevents covered workers from being given “comp time” when they work more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week. They now have to be paid overtime. Guess what? Many, if not most, employers simply will not allow workers to put in the extra hours. It’s just another instance of the federal government prohibiting a mutually agreeable arrangement between a worker and an employer.
Yup, nothing good will come of this.
Now, if someone is a little late, or has a doc appt, or wants to jet early on Friday, it’s no big deal. Is the work done? Yes, then No worries. I don’t care.
But, if employees are going to come at me saying, “I worked 42 hours, where’s my 2 hours of OT?” ..... Now I need to care if they came in on time, if they have an appointment, or if their kid is sick. This law will change people from workers to clock punchers.
Everyone loses. There are no winners here.
The international company I work for pays overtime called flextime. I don’t get $45 per hour for overtime, I get 7 bucks an hour and unfortunately it legal.
The international company I work for pays overtime called flextime. I don’t get $45 per hour for overtime, I get 7 bucks an hour and unfortunately it legal.
Is the comp time logged? If not then the rule makes sense because unscrupulous employers will never let someone use their comp time.
True enough, but I'm tellin' ya, this law takes away all of the flexibility of both the worker and employer.
I've worked in some miserable places, long (100, 120 hours) weeks. IT is like that, sometimes. However, the same place where I worked stupid long hours, I also worked a lot of 20 and 30 hour weeks. And, no matter what the hours were, if lunch ran a little long, or my kid had to go to the doctor, or if work was done and I was ready to knock off after lunch .... I just did it. No questions asked.
Actually, all of the places I've worked are like that. Been in IT for well over 20 years. When things break, it gets busy. When they're not broken - everyone can take a deep breath.
Nothing good is going to come out of this law. For people who are imagining all of the OT they'll get....it won't happen, much. If companies need to pay for it, 40 hours will be the standard, period, with a little bleedover in emergencies. IF you need to be at work by 8:00, you'll be there. Not 7:00 if it's more convenient, or 8:30 if traffic was bad. And, you'll leave at 5:00. Imagine working with someone on the East Coast on a critical project, and having them say, "Oop, it's 5:02. I need to get out of here. We can pick this up Monday, right?" Any company in more than one time zone will have their work come to a screeching halt, as the globe rotates.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, would you like a couple hours of OT here and there, or the freedom to say, "Hey, my kid's Christmas concert is this afternoon and I'd like to go see it. No problem, right?" "No worries, see you tomorrow..."
As the article points out, it creates a 2 tier system. The employer doesn't have a choice unless they can raise the pay of everyone to the new level. The non profit firm in the article has ~160 employees. Lets say 50 of them make 40K a year. To bring those people up to the new overtime threshold would cost well over $400K a year. The non profit isn't going to have those kind of resources. They will probably have to fire a few staff to pay for the time tracking management. The article also points out employees under the threshold will have to punch the clock and lose the ability to work from home.
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