Monday, December 01, 2014

A Good Way to Strengthen the Middle Class: Raise the Overtime Threshold

This idea will seriously close that income inequality gap and will probably help the economy quite well.

So let me be specific. To get the country back to the same equitable standards we had in 1975, the Department of Labor would simply have to raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid overtime when you worked more than 40 hours a week. That’s 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in their pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn’t want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack—slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages.

Unpaid overtime is rampant in corporate America from what I hear. It might make people happier to have the corporate culture change to one of looking out for your employees. If a company wants to make more money they have to hire more people instead of making the people there do more for no pay. Maybe the idea of compassionate capitalism needs to take root.

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