Fran Sussner Rodgers makes the case for overtime pay being extended for more workers, by raising the salary threshold. Her argument is less about money and much more about compelling employers to avoid disruption of employees’ lives:
In 1975, the last year the threshold was significantly raised, 60 percent of salaried workers fell within the requirement for overtime pay. Today, only 8 percent do, according to statistics compiled by the Economic Policy Institute. Under the new rule, millions of workers will be reclassified. Businesspeople oppose the change, calling it a job killer. Supporters anticipate a positive effect on job creation, income inequality and wage stagnation.
But this change also speaks to a subject I have been concerned with for many years: the clash between the finite amount of time employees actually have versus the desire of employers to treat time as an inexhaustible resource. And this issue affects everyone, whether eligible for overtime or not.
[…]
Employees in the United States currently work more hours than workers in any of the world’s 10 largest economies except Russia (though we don’t have good data for China). When everything over 40 hours is free to the employer, the temptation to demand more is almost irresistible. But for most employees, the ones exempt from overtime rules, their managers have little incentive to look for ways to use their time more efficiently.
It’s not just a question of getting paid fairly for every hour you work. It’s about using the time well. What I’ve learned is that an overwhelming majority of employees do not resent spending time that is clearly directed toward customers or the success of the enterprise. What they resent is time spent on work that is of no clear value: time wasted, or mismanaged. Countless parents, for example, told me that they had sat through poorly planned and seemingly pointless meetings at day’s end while thinking about their baby, feeling that their precious parenting time was being usurped by a feckless manager.
Others talked about memos, emails and work that goes nowhere. We encountered endless stories of parents being told that a last-minute task was urgent and needed to be done immediately, no matter how many extra hours it took, only to have any action related to it languish for weeks. Companies I worked with tried to reduce unnecessary work by devising “quality programs” and restructuring initiatives. But employees rarely felt any time relief from these efforts. Since there was no added cost for longer hours, the incentives were just not there to reduce total time worked, even after needless or less productive tasks were eliminated.
[…]
Time is our personal currency. We parcel it out, hour by hour, to meet the demands placed on us. We all pay a steep price, as individuals and as a nation, when we can’t meet our most important obligations.
And if employers really believe they need a report accomplished after 5pm on a Tuesday evening, screwing up family plans, let them pay overtime for it.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/122157335967
