Noam Scheiber at the New York Times posted a fantastic piece Monday about a surprising source of opposition to the Obama administration’s new overtime regulations: media and political elites.
As of Dec. 1, the law will require employers to pay the vast majority of salaried employees earning less than $47,476 annually overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week, double the current standard. As Vice President Joe Biden said when he announced the new regulations earlier this month, “If you work overtime, you should actually get paid for working overtime.”
The administration estimates this will raise the pay of more than 4 million workers by $12 billion over the next decade. And if an employer doesn’t want to pay the bill? Well, employees gain free time.
Sounds great, right?
Not, apparently, if you are a New York publishing insider. “You want to bump into the boss at 8 o’clock at night,” Dan Reynolds, the chief executive of Workman Publishing and a man otherwise known as, uh, the boss, told Scheiber.
Or a political activist.
In a statement released shortly after the rules were announced, Andre Delattre, the executive director of the United States Public Interest Research Group, better known as US PIRG, a left-leaning consumer watchdog organization, whined, “A person of means—in service of a cause to which they feel deeply committed—can volunteer to work for our organization for free for as many hours as they wish, but a person of lesser means—who is no less committed to the work we do—cannot agree to work for our organization for less than $47,476 without having their work hours strictly limited in order to keep our costs affordable.”
What’s going on here?
When the Obama administration first announced their intention to reform the overtime regulations two years ago, some of the most vehement protest came from employers of low-wage workers, like the fast food industry. And little wonder.
While hourly workers are almost always eligible for overtime pay, salaried workers are not—unless, that is, they earn less than the overtime threshold. When that amount was set at the current $23,660, there was an easy enough dodge. Give someone a managerial or professional title, and you were all but home free. While some companies—Hi, Chipotle!—have been sued by current and former employees who allege that their highfalutin’ job descriptions did not match the reality of their less than impressive responsibilities, it seems all but certain the vast majority got away with the practice.
The new rules are, of course, an attempt to do away with this rather disgraceful behavior. But raising the issue brought another uncomfortable truth to light. Employers in lower-prestige professions like fast food are not the only ones treating employees unfairly. Any number of higher-end, more prestigious industries were relying on the business model, too. Scheiber calls it “The Devil Wears Prada economy,” after the famed Lauren Weisberger novel, widely thought to be about her time working for Vogue’s Anna Wintour.
This is, of course, something of an established path for career advancement. You work long hours at your intro job—like, say, editorial assistant, or political canvasser, or would-be Hollywood agent—and try to take on extra duties as well, in the hopes the boss will notice you and promote you up.
This model has its supporters, including Slate’s Jordan Weissman, who wrote last year, “while overtime functions pretty well when it’s used to discourage companies from working vulnerable employees in low-skill positions to the bone, it’s not necessarily appropriate in creative industries where educated young people are out to make a name for themselves and margins are thin.”
However, an argument could be made that by enabling this sort of behavior at the more prestigious ends of the labor market, we are making the practice more acceptable for everyone by normalizing it.
Americans, somewhat famously, are a nation of workaholics. In 2014, a Gallup survey found that the average American claimed to be putting in 47 hours a week on the job. As I pointed out last year, most of us seem to think that’s proper, or at least acceptable. We idealize Silicon Valley, where outsize workweeks are the norm.
Yet this sort of time on the job is not exactly effective. Academic studies show that work performance deteriorates rapidly after someone puts in more than 50 hours a week. In fact, the drop-off point might even come after significantly fewer hours on the job. An Australian survey recently found that for people over the age of 40, performance began to decline after a mere 25 hours a week.
Moreover, it’s easy to suspect that the bosses claiming that their underlings are desperate to work long hours for low pay are telling themselves what they want to hear.
A quick tour of Glass Door, a site for job listings and career advice, makes it clear that many of US PIRG’s employees and former employees have a different take. “Take better care of your employees. Invest in them. Give them the financial resources to have a live outside of work,” one wrote the week after the new regulations were announced. “With such a low pay and laborious workload, it’s hard for people to make it a long-term job,” a former canvasser claimed. “Very long hours, high turnover, terrible work/life balance - employees are expected to devote almost all their time to their jobs (80+ hours a week),” wrote a third.
Liberals like to point fingers when people like presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claims, “Wages are too high,” because, as he put it a Republican debate last November, “People have to go out, they have to work really hard and they have to get into that upper stratum.” But as the US PIRG example reveals, it turned out they—OK, we—have something of a problem of our own.
The truth is this: Underpaid overwork is underpaid overwork, and it shouldn’t matter if you are serving burritos at Chipotle, making Anna Wintour’s manicure appointments, or lobbying for political change. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. That means getting paid for every hour spent on the job, not to mention getting a break from it.
