Policy group protests slimmed down OT rule

The labor-backed Economic Policy Institute is strongly protesting an attempt by four U.S. House “Blue Dog” Democrats to replace the Labor Department’s new overtime pay rule.

Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, Collin Peterson, D-Minn., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., would dump DOL’s new rule, scheduled to take effect on Dec. 1, that would greatly expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. The four would substitute a smaller hike and phase in the entire increase over three years.

DOL’s rule expands overtime rights to salaried employees who earn less than $913 per week, which is $47,476 yearly. That’s more than double the figure under the current overtime rule, imposed by the GOP George W. Bush Labor Department a decade ago.

The Blue Dogs’ legislation, EPI calculates, still would cover some workers now ineligible for overtime: Those earning up to $35,984 yearly, or $692 per week.

 The result of the current rule was that only five million workers were actually eligible for overtime pay last year, EPI says. DOL would more than triple that 2015 figure, to 17.6 million, it calculates. By cutting the overtime pay threshold and phasing in the entire hike, the four Blue Dogs would trim the number of overtime-eligible workers to 11.3 million on Dec. 1, EPI adds.

And the Blue Dogs would kill another Obama DOL overtime provision, to index future increases in the threshold to inflation, every three years.

“Rep. Schrader” – the bill’s lead sponsor – “wants to reproduce the very disaster for working people the Department of Labor is seeking to prevent: An inevitable and significant loss of guaranteed overtime coverage due to inflation and wage growth,” EPI reports.

“Failure to adequately update the salary threshold over 1975-2015 caused the share of the salaried workforce that was guaranteed overtime pay to fall from 49.6 percent to just 9.5 percent in 2015,” it adds.

Killing indexing would be even worse, EPI notes. “If Schrader’s bill were enacted, by 2035 there would be 10.4 million fewer salaried workers covered by overtime protection because of the failure to index the salary threshold. Lack of indexation would cut in half the share of the salaried workforce provided overtime protection,” they found, using federal data.

The four Blue Dogs portray their “Overtime Reform and Enhancement Act” as an overtime threshold increase, too. But they invoke “small business” and contend those firms need time to adjust. So they want to phase the hike in over three years. “Without sufficient time to plan for the increase, cuts and demotions will become inevitable, and workers will actually end up making less than they made before,” Schrader warned in a joint statement.

Straight ticket ballots will remain

Michigan’s newly adopted law to remove straight-ticket voting didn’t pass the smell test with either a U.S. district judge or a U.S. Court of Appeals panel.

Gov. Rick Snyder signed GOP legislation that removed the ability of Michiganians to vote for an entire slate of Democrats or Republicans on the ballot with a single punch hole on their ballot. Snyder called the new law “putting people before politics,” while Democrats claimed the GOP was doing the opposite, because Dems generally use the straight ticket option more often.

Democrats and a number of local clerks said the law would result in confusion and longer voting lines. Straight ticket voting has been in place since 1891 in Michigan, and in 2002, the state’s voters declined to eliminate straight ticket ballots.

After an appeal, U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain in July ruled the law should be put aside with an injunction, because it placed a disproportionate burden on African Americans’ right to vote. A three-member Court of Appeals this month declined to lift the injunction.

Attorney General Bill Schuette vowed to fight the order by asking the entire Sixth Circuit Court to review the decision, but such reviews are rare.