It's not news that the pay of middle-income workers has been
virtually flat for more than three decades. Since 1979, the productivity of
American workers — what they produce in an hour — has increased by 65 percent.
Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted hourly pay of workers in the middle of the
earnings distribution — what they can purchase with what they are paid for an
hour's work — has gone up just over 6 percent. Much of this productivity
increase has been captured by companies that are sitting on large cash cushions
while middle-income families struggle to make ends meet. Here's a simple reform proposal:
Let's pay workers for every hour they work.
Only salaried workers earning an annual income less than
$23,660 ($455 a week) are eligible for overtime pay when their workweek exceeds
40 hours. Employers can ask salaried employees — supervisors, customer service
representatives, social workers, counselors, support staff in law firms,
insurance sales agents, food service managers — to work well past the 40-hour
workweek without having to pay them for their time.
In 1975 by the Ford administration and again 10 years ago
during the George W. Bush administration, the presidents asked the Department
of Labor to adjust the salary cutoff for overtime pay to take into account the
effects of inflation. While the increases in the cutoff were welcome when they
occurred, they failed to fully account for the effects of inflation. And the
problem has only worsened in the last 10 years. Today, just 11 percent of
salaried workers are eligible for overtime pay when they work more than 40
hours a week, down dramatically from the more than 65 percent of salaried
workers who were eligible for such pay in 1975. In March 2014, President Obama,
like his Republican predecessors, asked the Department of Labor to update the
rules governing overtime pay to take into account the effects of inflation and
make sure that salaried employees who lack bargaining power vis-a-vis their
employer are paid for the hours they work. If the Department of Labor adjusts
the salary cutoff for eligibility for overtime pay to bring it back to its 1975
level adjusted for inflation, salaried workers earning up to $984 a week
($51,168 a year) would have access to overtime pay for hours above 40 in a
week. About 6.1 million white collar workers would be eligible to earn time-and-a-half
pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. This guarantees that these
employees are paid for the extra hours they work, and could provide a
meaningful boost to their income.
Of course, employers could choose to expand the hours of
part-time workers who would prefer longer hours or hire additional workers and
avoid paying overtime wages to current employees. While that would not raise
the pay of middle-income workers, it would guarantee that these workers were
actually paid for every hour they work. And it would increase the time they
could spend with their families. It would also boost the earnings of a
different group of middle-income workers who currently lack the hours they want
or may even be unemployed.
Extreme wealth is not earned. It is primarily taken from
others who actually do the productive, earnings-producing work, whether by
under-paying workers in proportion to their contribution to revenue generation,
putting the interests of investors ahead of the interests of the actual
producing workers, or by inheriting it outright.
What's ironic is that "laissez-faire capitalism"
cannot exist without a constant, firm, overarching government presence to hold
it all together: enforce the rules, protect the illicit winnings of exploiters,
guard the former against the exploited, and require that everyone be able to
account for every point gained or deducted in the big game (i.e. every dollar
taken in or spent/given out) to verify that it was gained or lost in accordance
with the government-established rules of capitalism.
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