New Overtime Rules Address Inefficiency

Leaders in the business community claim that raising the salary threshold for overtime will be a job-killer, but a writer argues in the New York Times that the rule change is necessary to address an upsetting trend in the American workplace: the inefficient use of employee time. “When everything over 40 hours is free to the employer, the temptation to demand more is almost irresistible,” Fran Sussner Rodgers writes. By shifting the rules and making millions more American workers eligible for overtime, the Department of Labor has sparked a long-overdue examination about how workers’ finite time is used.