Overtime pay cut ..........~Star Angel~

YESTERDAY marked the beginning of the biggest pay cut in American history.

It was on that day that the Bush administration’s overtime pay cut became official. This is the controversial new federal rule that could strip as many as six million U.S. workers of their overtime pay protection and force them to work longer hours without fair compensation.

Nurses, police lieutenants, chefs, team leaders, working supervisors, assistant managers and financial services workers all over New Hampshire are just some of the millions of workers who used to earn overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week — and who lost that eligibility on Monday.

Not only will these employees no longer get overtime pay -— they’ll be working extra hours for free, earning only their base salary. That means a huge pay cut. Currently, time-and-a-half premium pay for overtime work accounts for 25 percent of the income of those who work overtime. That averages out to about $161 every week.

And what incentive will employers have to keep workers’ hours reasonable if they don’t have to pay extra for extra work? None. Workers without overtime pay rights are twice as likely to work more than 40 hours per week, three times as likely to work more than 50 hours, and three times as likely to work more than 60 hours.

The fact is that working families will have less time with their families thanks to President Bush’s new overtime rule.

These overtime rules are also bad news for our economy at a time when we can least afford it. Our nation is already in a deep jobs hole. We have 1.6 million fewer jobs than when President Bush took office. Last month, working Americans were disappointed when the economy created only 32,000 jobs, a small fraction of the 200,000 that were expected.

Under the new rule, employers will tend to work their current workers longer hours rather than creating new jobs, which will make the underlying problems in our economy even worse. At a time when workers’ paychecks are down, joblessness is up, and Americans are working more hours than workers in any other industrialized nation, President Bush has made the wrong decision in implementing his new rule.

Even three former Department of Labor officials — three of the highest ranking DOL officials under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton — agree that these new overtime rules hurt workers. They have issued an analysis that concludes that with one exception, every one of the administration’s changes to the overtime rules will weaken the eligibility requirement and increase the number of workers who will lose their overtime rights.

This new rule was sold as “modernization.” But the truth is these are changes in the law which giant corporations have fought for years to win.

A number of low-income workers will gain overtime pay rights under the new rule, and we applaud this long-overdue change. But this gain does not justify the Bush administration’s decision to take overtime pay rights away from millions of other workers, a move bipartisan majorities of Congress tried to block.

Last May, the Senate voted not once, but twice, to guarantee that no worker will lose his or her overtime rights. The two amendments passed by the Senate would repeal large portions of the Bush regulation that restrict overtime eligibility. This marks the fourth time in the past year that members of Congress have voted to prohibit overtime pay cuts.

But the overtime guarantee passed by the Senate is unlikely to become law unless approved by the House of Representatives. This explains why the House Republican leadership has blocked any debate or votes on protecting workers’ overtime rights — because they know that an overtime guarantee would likely pass in the House and would repeal major portions of the Bush overtime regulation. Workers in New Hampshire and the rest of the United States deserve an up-or-down vote in the House of Representatives on this issue when Congress returns in September.

An overtime guarantee would give workers the peace of mind of knowing that they will not be losing their right to overtime pay, and it would calm the intense political passions that have been stirred by the Bush plan. Anything less is simply a massive pay cut for America’s workers.

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