• Overtime for vets Overtime for vets Join the Navy. See the world. Kiss overtime pay goodbye forever.” How’s that for a slogan? Uncle Sam isn’t about to slap it on his recruiting posters, but the Labor Department is turning
• Overtime for vets
Overtime for vets
Join the Navy. See the world. Kiss overtime pay goodbye forever.” How’s that for a slogan?
Uncle Sam isn’t about to slap it on his recruiting posters, but the Labor Department is turning it into official government policy. The department is making it easier for employers to chop the paychecks of veterans.
The details are buried in the department’s new rules for overtime pay. Those rules are expected to deny overtime to perhaps 8 million low-level, white-collar workers.
Among other things, the new rules change the definition of a “learned” expert who need not be paid overtime. No longer will that require an advanced college degree, or real authority to use independent judgment. Now you can become learned simply by doing a job, combined with training at a technical school or “training in the armed forces.”
Management at Boeing just about jumped up and cheered when it got wind of that. Boeing wrote the Labor Department saying it “strongly supports” the change. “Boeing observes that many of its most skilled technical workers received a significant portion of their knowledge and training outside the university classroom, typically in a branch of the military service, where through a combination of classroom training and field experience they become ‘learned experts,’ ” wrote Cheryl A. Russell, Boeing’s director of federal affairs, as quoted in The Washington Post.
As policy goes, this is nuts. Is the reward for serving your country a pay cut when you return to private industry?
Even if it never mentioned the military, the policy still would be badly misguided. It punishes learning. Why take technical courses if the boss may consider them reason to exempt you from overtime?
Current law makes most people eligible for pay at time and a half for working more than 40 hours per week. Managers and true professionals are exempt. Now, at the behest of big business, President George W. Bush’s administration is changing the rules to make it easier to deny overtime to millions of paralegals, draftsmen, practical nurses, newspaper reporters and others.
When the new rules take effect, probably in March, the boss will be able to work these people all he wants without an extra dime. They deserve better – especially those who have served their country.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
