Bush to Employers: Cut Your Workers' Pay

President Bush's Labor Department is giving advice to employers on how to avoid paying overtime, suggesting among other ideas that they cut workers' salaries.

The advice comes as Bush is changing overtime rules that will make 8 million workers ineligible for overtime pay. It will also make a much smaller number, 1.3 million workers, newly eligible for overtime.

The Labor Department's advice to employers gives them ways to avoid paying the costs of overtime to the new workers, as well as workers currently receiving overtime pay. The advice includes suggestions to:

• Cut workers' salaries so that they must work overtime in order to earn their current base salaries. This would require employees to work more hours for less pay. The Bush administration cynically refers to this cut in pay as a "payroll adjustment."
• Raise workers' salaries to just over the threshold that makes them ineligible for overtime, which Bush sets at $22,100. This would mean workers who now rely on overtime pay to make ends meet would now work the same long hours for vastly reduced pay.
• Enforce a 40-hour work week so that workers cannot earn the overtime pay they need to make end meet.

These suggestions that employers make devastating cuts to their workers' pay was met with fury by activists who fight for working families. A lawyer for the Communications Workers of America said that the "plan speaks volumes about the real motives of this so-called family friendly administration. AFL-CIO President John Sweeny said that "improving the basic overtime pay right for America's workers ought to be the Labor Department's first priority — not advising employers on strategies they may use if they want to avoid paying their workers for overtime." [Associated Press, 1/6/04; AFL-CIO release, 1/7/04]

Source: DNC Services Corporation - ((http://www.democrats.org/news/200401080002.html))