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Overtime Pay
Protect Overtime Pay
Hard working men and women are seeing their way of life on the verge of collapse as health insurance costs skyrocket, pensions disappear, and real wages stagnate. Now the Bush Administration is trying to take away workers overtime pay.
| Overtime Pay |
| We won an essential step in the struggle to keep overtime pay when the Senate voted 54-45. Stay tuned for updates. |
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Congress and the Department of Labor are trying to change the rules on overtime pay, eliminating the 40 hour work week, taking eligibility for overtime pay away from millions of workers, and replacing time and a half pay with comp days. These proposals, hidden behind family-friendly names, will take money right out of your pocket, making it harder to take care of your family's needs, if you do not speak out.
The Labor Department's proposal to broaden job classifications would make millions of workers exempt from receiving overtime pay, thus slashing workers' incomes by thousands of dollars. If the Labor Department succeeds in changing overtime regulations, you could go to work one day to find out that no matter how many hours you work in a week you would never get any overtime pay in your paycheck! The proposed broader job classifications of "administrative," "executive," and "professional" would cost grocery store department managers, hospital LPNs, pharmacy technicians, and millions of other workers thousands per year in lost overtime wages.
Big business special interests and anti-worker representatives have also led the charge against workers' overtime pay in Congress.
- When anti-worker representatives realized they didn't have the votes, they pulled a House bill that would have replaced time and a half for any hours worked after 40 with comp days--the use of which would be dictated by your boss.
- The Senate version of a similar bill could be introduced anytime. This bill includes an attack on the workweek, in which a two-week, 80-hour work unit would replace the 40-hour workweek. This means that your boss could require that you work 60 hours one week and 20 hours the next without any overtime pay.
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| Overtime pay makes up about one-fourth of the average weekly earnings of workers who receive it. That is an average pay cut of $161 a week and can add up to thousands of dollars a year. |
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These sweeping changes would rob workers of their economic stability and replace it with an unreasonable work schedule. This is no way to restart the economy. Workers depend on overtime pay and consistent schedules to provide for their families. We will not let the big business-backed Congress and Labor Department steal money from our pockets and time with our families with these corporate-sponsored proposals.
If anything is done to change the laws governing overtime pay, it should be to strengthen the current regulations and to raise minimum salary levels to account for inflation.
For the next few weeks we have an opportunity to block President Bush's drive to take away overtime pay from millions of Americans. The Senate voted to block changes from being made to the overtime laws. Now we wait.
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