Wal-Mart Raises Salaries, Avoiding Overtime Rule

Current Labor Department rules require employers to pay overtime to workers who make less than $23,660 a year. New rules, scheduled to go into effect December 1, raise that cutoff to $47,500 a year and will make thousands of employees newly eligible for overtime pay, but apparently Wal-Mart entry level managers won’t be among them. It’s been reported that Wal-Mart has raised the salaries of these workers from $47,476 to $48,000, putting them above the threshold. The Hill reports that, meanwhile, the number of lawsuits challenging the new rules continues to increase. It now includes 21 states and dozens of business groups, who argue that the threshold is so high that salaried administrative and professional employees would become eligible for a kind of pay schedule that was never intended to apply at that level. A Wal-mart pay raise with a very different slant also made the news recently. The New York Times reports that starting last year, Wal-Mart began give raises to its hourly workers across the board, after a period when it became impossible to ignore how stores had started to look shabby, with scant and iffy customer service. Results are said to look promising.