Last night, on the Huffington Post, President Obama blogged his intentions to announce long-awaited new overtime regulations later today.
In a post entitled, “A Hard Day’s Work Deserves a Fair Day’s Pay,” the President wrote:
Right now, too many Americans are working long days for less pay than they deserve. That’s partly because we’ve failed to update overtime regulations for years—and an exemption meant for highly paid, white collar employees now leaves out workers making as little as $23,660 a year—no matter how many hours they work.
This week, I’ll head to Wisconsin to discuss my plan to extend overtime protections to nearly 5 million workers in 2016, covering all salaried workers making up to about $50,400 next year.
- The salary-level at which employees will qualify for either the administrative, executive, professional, and computer employee exemptions will increase from $23,660 a year (or $455 per week) to $50,400 (or $969.23 per week) (could they not make it an even thousand?)
- The earliest these new regulations will take effect is sometime next year.
While the White House has laudable aspirations to “strengthen the middle class” and “commit to an economy that rewards hard work, generates rising incomes, and allows everyone to share in the prosperity of a growing America” in reality, it will likely be “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
(Update) The DOL has made available various resources (hat tip: Lawffice Space):
- The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [pdf] (all 295 pages, which includes the text of the proposed regulatory changes)
- A helpful one-page fact sheet
- A FAQ