(The Chicago Tribune posted the following article by T. Shawn Taylor on its website on January 20.)
CHICAGO — Is overtime really over for some of us?
The final showdown over the Bush administration’s proposed rewrite of overtime eligibility rules begins Tuesday with a Senate hearing at which supporters and opponents of the plan will be asked to defend their positions.
The hearing, set for 10 a.m. Chicago time, precedes a crucial afternoon vote on whether to end debate on an omnibus spending bill or continue discussing whether to reattach an amendment that would block attempts to take away overtime pay.
Opponents of the Labor Department’s plan are asking senators to vote against cloture and to force debate, which began when the proposal was released last March.
Businesses have endorsed the plan as clarifying difficult, decades-old regulations that spell out who gets paid overtime. But worker advocates have shot it down as perhaps the biggest threat to the livelihood of working Americans.
Nurses, police officers, firefighters and accountants are among the groups that opponents have said would lose overtime if the plan is implemented.
On Friday, the AFL-CIO issued a statement identifying another group of victims: veterans. The release explained how military training that veterans receive for technical, medical, engineering and scientific occupations could be substituted for a four-year college degree to classify them as “professional” employees exempt from overtime.
But government officials have said a lot of the criticism of the proposal is premature. The Labor Department is still reviewing more than 75,000 comments collected during the 90-day public comment period that ended last summer and has yet to release a final proposal, which it hopes to do by the end of March.
“Yes, there will be changes,” Victoria Lipnic, the assistant secretary of labor for employment standards, said Monday. “This is a long, deliberative process and these are important regulations, and we want to make sure we have a chance to take all the comments into consideration and ultimately craft a final regulation that will benefit the most workers. That has been our goal all along.”
Debate over the overtime issue has, at times, been as confusing as the rules that explain who’s eligible for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Opponents estimate 8 million or more workers will lose overtime. Government officials have said 644,000 would lose it.
Government officials have emphasized that 1.3 million low-wage workers would gain overtime due to a significant and overdue increase in the minimum annual salary below which workers automatically qualify for overtime. That level will be raised to $22,100 from $8,060.
But recently, critics blasted the Labor Department for issuing tips to employers on ways to avoid paying overtime to low-wage workers.
Opponents have been putting the Labor Department on the defensive since the agency released its proposal last March. The department updated the white-collar overtime exemptions at the behest of employers who complained the rules were outdated and exposed them to class-action lawsuits. But opponents say the changes are being done to appease Bush supporters in the business community.
Opponents alerted the public through protests and an online campaign seeking public comment, and they’ve responded. More than 1.5 million people have contacted lawmakers.
It’s unclear what will finally end all the twists and turns that have resulted from the overtime issue. Republicans have threatened to fund government agencies on a continuing resolution for the rest of the year to avoid the issue. And opponents say that if they lose in Congress, they’ll take their fight to the courts.