Friday, September 10, 2004 :::
 

No sign yet of ‘millions’ of workers allegedly losing overtime

By Bill Leonard

For months, opponents of the new U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) rules on white-collar exemptions to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have been claiming that millions of Americans would lose overtime pay when the rules took effect Aug. 23. That was a key reason for the Sept. 9 vote in the House designed to prevent DOL from enforcing most of the new rules. (See related article.)

And on Aug. 23, when Democrats, union officials and others gathered in front of the DOL headquarters building in Washington to denounce the rules, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, pointed to an article in a Midwestern newspaper reporting that more than 2,000 workers with Sears, Roebuck and Co. would no longer be eligible for time-and-a-half pay for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.

This was “just the beginning” of a disaster that could only be described as “an assault on the wages of working Americans,” Harkin said.

Problem is, that article turned out to be wrong. Apparently, someone got the terms “exempt” and “non-exempt” crossed, according to a source who has followed the debate closely. Sears officials have attempted to clear the air by announcing that not a single Sears associate will lose overtime protections as a result of the DOL’s changes.

Said a company statement: “Sen. Tom Harkin incorrectly reported the impact new overtime rules would have on the employees of Sears, Roebuck and Co. As a result of the new overtime pay rules, less than 1 percent of Sears’ 190,000 employees now classified as exempt will be reclassified as non-exempt and now will be eligible for overtime pay.”

In fact, no example of significant loss of overtime eligibility at any company has surfaced to date, say proponents of the new rules, including, of course, officials in the DOL. They say that based on media reports that they have seen—assuming, of course, that others in the media have correctly interpreted the complicated regulations—some people are gaining overtime pay.

So if the DOL initiative amounts to “the biggest pay cut in American history,” as Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., recently called it, workers are certainly taking it in stride.

While the newspaper published a correction, Harkin and other opponents of the rule changes have not backed off their claims. But with each passing day without concrete evidence that millions of Americans have lost overtime pay, DOL officials are becoming more confident in their predictions that the rules—which were altered substantially earlier this year to address some issues raised by critics—will not be a huge burden for workers.

“This sort of dispels some of the critics’ doom and gloom” predictions and tactics, Alfred B. Robinson, acting head of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, told HR News. “Anecdotally, the information we’ve received based on press reports is that people are gaining overtime protection” rather than losing it in substantial numbers.

A letter distributed Sept. 8 by Reps. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., cited more than two dozen articles reporting that employers are re-classifying their workers from exempt to non-exempt status, making them eligible for the extra pay.

Robinson said his office would not be tracking overtime pay changes in the private sector scientifically, and he wouldn’t say if any complaints had been filed with DOL offices from employees unhappy about their new pay status.

He said that a task force that Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao created in April “has been monitoring information that comes in all across the country, in each region. They are meeting telephonically on a weekly basis. We’re monitoring it [in Washington] and making sure that we are answering questions as they come up.”

Bill Leonard is senior writer for HR News. Managing editor Steve Bates contributed to this report.

::: posted by Curtis aka exeter_acres at Friday, September 10, 2004

0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment