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Petition to Congress:
"Expand overtime pay and restore overtime protections to the millions of workers hurt by the Trump administration and conservative business lawsuits. Support the Restoring Overtime Pay Act."
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An Obama-era rule would have expanded overtime pay to 4 million workers. But the Trump administration helped business interests sabotage the new rule in courts. Now, Trump's Department of Labor has put forward a drastically watered-down proposal that would cost at least 8.2 million people their hard-earned wages.2 This proposal gives corporate executives and Wall Street tycoons a $1.5 trillion tax handout that pads their pockets without creating jobs - and robbing overtime pay from millions of working Americans.1
Democrats in Congress just reintroduced legislation that would save overtime pay for millions of workers.3 Please, show support of this bill.
For 41 years, the threshold for receiving overtime pay has been stuck at $23,660 ‒ below the poverty level for a family of four. Even as rent and other costs increased and the dollar lost value, if you made a cent over that limit, you were not eligible for overtime pay, no matter how long you worked. Between 1975 and today, the number of salaried employees who received overtime pay for working 40+ hours a week dropped from 65 percent to 11 percent.4 But Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta said paying people for their labor would “create a stress on the system.”5
On top of it all, businesses routinely use loopholes to deny employees pay by calling workers 'managers' to exempt them from overtime even if they spend 95% of their time at the cash register.
One of the Obama administration's hard-won victories was a new rule setting the threshold at $47,000, rising with inflation. If the original threshold had taken cost of living into account, it would be around $58,000 today. A threshold that again covered 65% of the workforce would be $69,000.6 In contrast, the Trump administration's proposed threshold is $35,000.
The Restoring Overtime Pay Act would take the carefully constructed Obama overtime rule and make it law – closing loopholes and setting an overtime threshold of more than $51,000.7 Opposing it openly exposes Trump and Republicans as the party of greedy executives, so we need to rally behind it in a big way.
Tell Congress: Protect overtime pay for American workers. Click below to sign the petition:
- Heidi Hess, CREDO Action
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