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WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said his administration would soon release details of a highly anticipated reform to the nation’s overtime rules, telling The Huffington Post on Friday that many Americans were being “cheated” out of time-and-a-half pay.
“What we’ve seen is, increasingly, companies skirting basic overtime laws, calling somebody a manager when they’re stocking groceries and getting paid $30,000 a year,” Obama said in a sit-down interview with HuffPost. “Those folks are being cheated.”
A little over a year ago, Obama directed the Labor Department to revise rules that determine who’s eligible for a pay premium when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Current rules, implemented by the George W. Bush administration, are ungenerous to workers, and Obama clearly wants to expand them.
The question now is just how aggressive the White House will be and how willing it is to rankle the business lobby.
The key to the reforms is the so-called salary threshold. Salaried workers who earn less than a certain amount of money in a year are automatically entitled to time-and-a-half pay, no matter their job duties. Right now, that salary threshold is $23,660. The administration will raise that threshold to make more workers eligible for overtime. The higher the threshold, the more employers will have to face a choice: Either don’t allow workers to exceed 40 hours a week or start paying them for the extra time they work.
Asked what sort of number he had in mind, Obama declined to say.
