Regulators Work Overtime For Workers' Rights

[beechnut79]

(07-30-2016, 10:10 AM)Dan Wrote: http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Quote:If there’s something that convention attendees in Philadelphia and Cleveland both agree on, it’s that America needs higher middle-class living standards. But we won’t have to wait until 2017: The Obama administration last month promulgated a new regulation that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. The regulation, which will take effect in December, doubles the annual salary threshold under which employees receive time-and-a-half after logging 40 hours a week. Labor groups are hailing this move as a victory, but many businesses are trying to avoid forking over any extra compensation. Their resistance, however, may not hold under a rising tide of laws and regulations aimed at protecting workers.

Under current law, most salaried workers who are not executives, managers, or administrators have the right to overtime pay. Workers below a certain salary level (now $23,660) are entitled to it regardless of their job duties. The new regulation extends these protections in two basic ways. One provision raises the nonexempt salary threshold to $47,476 and provides a formula to update it automatically every three years. The second provision offers more specific descriptions of job duties to determine which employees with salaries above the threshold qualify as exempt...



http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Does anyone know what the aftermath of this has been? Did it ever get passed in full form, or even a diluted one? Workers' rights has been among my soapbox issue especially after an incident I experienced back in 2009. Three years later I wrote a fictionalized account of what went down in a self-published book which I titled JUDAS TIMES SEVEN. A psychic had told me that I was the victim of betrayal and she saw that seven people were involved, hence the title. This is one of the issues that has been largely been put on the back burner, even before the current Ukraine crisis broke. 

Have often said that there should be a bill of rights of sorts for salaried workers so that companies would no longer be able to get several hours of week of free labor from them. It seems as though the PTB find anything proposing improvement in standard working conditions to be scary. And some, such as Amazon, have become near monopolies by treating their workforce as livestock at best, vermin at worst.

At the very least we should cancel the strict at-will employment model and replace it with one where a grievance procedure would be required which in turn would mean that in most cases a just cause would be required for employee termination. Mass necessary layoffs would not be included in such. Isn't it time to release what isn't working, and the model we have been under for the past four decades certainly qualifies.

Many if not most members of the current society have been overly focused on work for those four decades, which I have often pointed out has produced a near society-wide "I don't have time" syndrome, which in turn made liars out of many futurists who had predicted that the technology most of us now kneel at the feet of would produce a world of ever increasing leisure. Isn't now a good time to find the balance between our work-life and following one's dreams? And, isn't this at least part and parcel of the current so-called Great Resignation?