Millions more workers would be eligible for overtime pay under new federal rule

Re: Will this end salaried entry level management positions?

this is good news. To be honest I think it should be higher. I think anyone making less than 100k a year should be paid hourly.

apdst said:

No one can interpret The Constitution. No branch can interpret The Constitution meaning of the words contained within The Constitution. They can't change the meaning of, "abridged"", or, "infringed", or any other part of The Constitution. It's scary to know so many people believe the government can redefine words to mean what they want them to mean.

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The Constitution is an intentionally vague document that HAS TO BE INTERPRETED to the realities of modern life, specific laws, and it's why we have courts in part, to do that inevitable and explicitly anticipated job.

Re: Will this end salaried entry level management positions?

apdst said:

It isn't about options. It's about ambition. Those folks have the same ability to improve their lives as anyone else

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Like I said, I don't get the right wing tendency to figuratively spit on WORKING people because they have a bad job. It's really something that mystifies me.

BTW, I'm sure most folks don't stay in those jobs for long, but so what? Why heap contempt on them while they're doing a necessary job to put food on YOUR damn table? I'm glad they do it, same as the folks who pick up the trash, pick crops, clean the hotels I sleep in, clean toilets in bars and restaurants, etc.

In not better off just because I got lucky. I don't care what Obama says.

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I don't think he said that, and it's a straw man for this topic anyway.

Re: Will this end salaried entry level management positions?

apdst said:

It isn't about options. It's about ambition. Those folks have the same ability to improve their lives as anyone else

In not better off just because I got lucky. I don't care what Obama says.

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unless you were born rich... you are better off in part because generations before you sacrificed and created laws.. such as this one, that allowed you social mobility.

ashurbanipal said:

Some of them will, but most will not. This was not the case before Bush changed the overtime rules, and people (including company owners) will learn to adjust. But what you're saying is a good reason we shouldn't give even one inch back to owners/managers from intuitive fair practices. Once they get used to being able to get a certain level of work out of people and not pay for it, it'll take a long time to adjust back.

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Was the change that Bush made this drastic? This is more than doubling the wage. No, they are going hourly. Worse, they'll be going hourly and they aren't getting any overtime because overtime is too expensive. Add a person with the money saved from eliminating MBO bonuses. Hourly employees don't get MBO's.

ashurbanipal said:

Well, maybe I was just in the wrong business, but no one in the retail grocery industry (that I ever met, anyway) gives a flying F. Burn out one manager, there'll be another bright young thing to replace him. Most of my adult students express, at one point or another, something similar about their experiences with their own jobs. Maybe there are businesses out there that genuinely care about the people they employ, but the vast majority of businesspeople I've ever met do not care about anything more than their own paychecks.

I agree that treating people like garbage and making them work long hours leads to poor performance. Most of the businesspeople I've ever met look at that and say "so what?" There's always a fresh crop of people eager to be put through the ringer, and as long as that's the only game in town--until basically everyone is able to get jobs where they won't be treated that way, people will put up with it, because the alternative is to starve. We've seen what happens when government doesn't regulate businesses, and it's a freakin' nightmare.

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In my town we have but three grocery stores. A small one owned by the mayor, and they just have hourly folks and him. Quality Foods which isn't open on Sundays, and only has a couple of assistant managers that are salary. Won't be a big issue for them, they aren't like a 24 hour operation, any way. Then there is Walmart. As much as the left hates Walmart, they did something right on this one. Their department managers start at $13 per hour and are all hourly employees. Walmart's Assistant Managers starting pay is $16 per hour, they are hourly as well. The store managers, who are salary average $90k plus so they won't be an issue.

Re: Will this end salaried entry level management positions?

cpwill said:

I'm not the one looking down on them for it - you are.

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How did you come up with that idiocy? You compared them to poultry workers.

apdst said:

The Supreme Court can't interpret The Constitution and certainly not at will.

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It is a good thing then that we have such luminaries as yourself who can do it for us, as and when needed.

Re: Will this end salaried entry level management positions?

prometeus said:

How did you come up with that idiocy? You compared them to poultry workers.

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:shrug: Because I don't look down on either. Why do you assume that poultry workers are inherently less worthy?

Southern Dad said:

Was the change that Bush made this drastic? This is more than doubling the wage.

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As I recall (and I should recall a I was one of the ones who had to read the policy and make sure we were in compliance), he nearly halved the threshold. So yeah, this essentially reverses what Bush did. Interestingly, the outcome for my business was, first, that we saved nearly $1m per year in labor costs. After a couple of years, the President directed me and the other senior VPs to fire about half the company and demand the remainder do all the work their canned compatriots had done, in addition to their own. Labor costs went way down, and shareholders raked in the dough. The remaining workers I had (I didn't have to pay them overtime any longer) stayed because the job market sucked (other businesses had had the same idea) and they didn't see themselves as having much in the way of prospects.

ashurbanipal said:

As I recall (and I should recall a I was one of the ones who had to read the policy and make sure we were in compliance), he nearly halved the threshold. So yeah, this essentially reverses what Bush did. Interestingly, the outcome for my business was, first, that we saved nearly $1m per year in labor costs. After a couple of years, the President directed me and the other senior VPs to fire about half the company and demand the remainder do all the work their canned compatriots had done, in addition to their own. Labor costs went way down, and shareholders raked in the dough. The remaining workers I had (I didn't have to pay them overtime any longer) stayed because the job market sucked (other businesses had had the same idea) and they didn't see themselves as having much in the way of prospects.

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Great. If they don't have other prospects then they are being paid what they are worth. Labor is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Southern Dad said:

Great. If they don't have other prospects then they are being paid what they are worth. Labor is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

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This is obviously false, and furthermore, deleterious, as Adam Smith himself observed in The Wealth of Nations. If we go back far enough in time, say, to Western Medieval Europe, laborers were paid on free market principles (we know this because after the black death, labor prices skyrocketed), but for many centuries, were paid virtually nothing, while their masters, the aristocrats, reaped truly unbelievable profits. The Duc de Berri once threw a wedding party for his niece, and spent as much on three days of revelry as all the peasants in the third of France he ruled made in a whole year.

Through the influence of money, employers have arrogated political power to themselves, and use that to manipulate markets. What I did, and what other companies did, was a prime example of that.

It seems that the labourer is no longer worthy of his hire. To some.

Manc Skipper said:

It seems that the labourer is no longer worthy of his hire. To some.

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Yep. I wish more people would actually read Adam Smith and really think about what he said. The notion that wages ought to be determined purely by market principles is just not a good idea, because there will always be pressure from those at the upper ends of the economic ladder to manipulate labor markets, and they'll almost always find a way to do it. We've seen that so often in history I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to leave companies to their own devices on this point. The only thing we can do about it is regulate what employers can and cannot do with their employees, what they can and cannot do with their pay, and so on. This does not mean we should go all Soviet-style socialism or anything; market principles have a part to play in determining wages. But they cannot be the only factor unless we want to return to feudalism. We are in the early patristic stages of that transition right now.

I was once a drinker of the same kool-aid, but I figured it out by careful re-examination of my assumptions and honest, often uncomfortable, observation of the world.