New guidelines issued by Obama administration will extend overtime pay to 4.2 million USA workers.
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The updated federal overtime rule will soon affect millions of salaried employees including Gallagher, an office manager near Wilkes-Barre. A diminishing proportion of workers have benefited from overtime regulations, which date to the 1930s and require employers to pay 1 1/2 times a worker’s wage for work that exceeds 40 hours a week.
The NRF predicts most employers will cut their employees off at 40 hours before paying them overtime. But they can also raise an employee’s salary to the new threshold to avoid shelling out overtime.
Perez explained, “For us, what it does is fortifies the basic pillars of worker protection, which is middle class jobs should pay middle class wages and when you work extra, you should be paid extra”.
The rule unveiled Tuesday doubles the salary threshold for time-and-a-half overtime eligibility from $455 a week to $913 a week, or from $23,660 to $47,476 for a full-year worker. The threshold was last updated in 2004 after nearly 30 years without an increase, and the Obama administration says inflation has been cutting into the real value of that threshold.
But while making the announcement in Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said the change is more than just good business, it’s the right thing to do. “So how many people can I now afford to hire?” she says.
Garrett said the new rule sends his restaurant plans back to the drawing board. The result is likely to still cause at least some payroll adjustments. “With this new regulation, fewer working parents will be able to have flexible schedules or work from home if their employers are forced to track every hour they work”. “It is a possibility of payroll increasing, but at this point we are not real positive on how much of a change it’ll make”. The new rule will create problems for managers, some of them newer, who take longer to get their work done, she said.
Despite fancy titles, a majority of them put in 50 or 60-hour weeks without getting paid for the extra hours beyond 40 in a week. But their take home pay is consistent week to week.
But some may still end up logging long hours for the same pay if their employers adjust their hourly rate lower to offset any overtime pay they’ll be owed. In those cases, the pay would fluctuate.
As for ECU, officials with the university will be looking at hours and overtime pay within the next week to determine the best approach to handling the new rule.
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“It was really an outdated amount”.
