Hi Karen,
I can't possibly comment on the American overtime scene, but what I do know is that it has been a racket in England for a long time. Initially in industry 20-40 years ago, but now common in the public services.
Let us remember St. Erving of Goffman, the great student of real human relations under conditions distorted by asymmetrical social power (e.g., his book _Asylums_, where he studied how mental patients "worked the system" in mental hospitals).
I think it's to be expected that wherever persons are subjected to a system, they will look for ways to "work" it (like water seeks for fissures in the container that holds it). The best ways to work a system, of course, are ones that use its rules against themselves, but often a person does not discover any such...)....
There is, perhaps, one exception: those whose positions come with perks built-in, like CxOs whose lunches *are* business expenses. Of course even these persons sometimes try to work the system (despite the fact that the system is already working for them...). "The public" does not look favorably on executives who are not content with their "legitimate" emoluments of office and "cook the books" for "personal gain" -- as if they weren't getting more than enough personal gain from their positions de jure! I think there must be some persons who are "sick" -- such as millionaires who get caught shoplifting instead of just paying for what they want from their bottomless pockets.
"Many things are strange, but strangest of all is man...."
(--Sophocles, _Antigone_, "Ode to Man")\brad mccormick
In the 70s when I worked for 20 years in the automobile industry in Coventry I saw one automobile firm after another (five altogether) go into bankruptcy because of overtime rackets and incompetent management who hadn't the nerve to stop it.
In the factory in which I worked, we made more farm tractors than any other factory in the world -- about 2,000 a day (1200 on day shift, 800 at night). The overtime racket was such that the typical worker earned more than his foreman, and more than at least one management level above him. I had a staff of 120 chemists, metallurgists and engineering inspectors and earned less than any of them. (I compensated by delegating every last bit of my job, and I spent my time reading. I reckon I'd read my way through the equivalent of two or three university degrees during that period. Unfortunately, not economics. I've had to learn that in old age since joining Futurework!)
Just how much of a racket it was was revealed during Edward Health's Prime Ministership in the 70s when the coal miners went on strike. After the coal stockpiles went down, power stations were reduced to only three days a week of producing electricity. Thus, at Massey-Ferguson, five large factory workshops, each the size of four football fields, were thus without power and were silent for two days a week. You would imagine therefore that the production of tractors would have gone down from 10,000 a week to 8,000, wouldn't you?
You would be wrong. We produced just as many as we normally did for as long as the coal strike lasted. And how was that? you may well ask. The reason why was that, in normal times, the machine tools and the assembly track were only producing about 80% of what they were capable of during the week. The machine tools were kept running (and consuming electricity) while they weren't producing so that the managers could hear them running and pretend that that they were working normally. The assembly track was run at 80% of its optimum speed but, once again, the managers would pretend that it was running normally.
The workers, of course, were saving the balance for the week-end. They'd all come in on a Saturday at double-time pay and polish off the remaining 20%. That's why, for as long as the three-day week lasted, it actually made no difference at all to final production numbers. The workers didn't earn overtime for this period, of course, but at least they took home basic pay.
Government postal workers today also have their overtime rackets. Letters that are received at the local sorting office on a Friday night shift for Saturday delivery are not sorted but divided into two lots. One lot is sorted for delivery the next morning; the second lot is sorted during overtime on Saturday for Monday delivery. There is, of course, "normal" overtime for letters that arrive at the sorting office during the week-end for Monday delivery -- but of course it isn't delivered on Monday but on Tuesday. Sometimes my subscription Economist which should be delivered on Friday, doesn't get delivered until Monday or even Tuesday. But by then I've usually bought another copy from a shop. So the Economist frequently does well out of the postal workers!
As far as I can judge, overtime is probably a racket everywhere, and it sounds as though it's well grounded in America, too! But I'm surprised that it is a matter for legislation. Good management and responsible trade unions are the answer, not legislation. If only the workers would realise that in fiddling overtime they're actually diminishing their case for a better basic wage. Over the longer term they're probably no better off financially for losing their leisure time. But that's part of man's irrationality in economic matters.
Keith Hudson
At 15:05 26/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:
Talk about a campaign issue! Maybe the White House is waiting for a retirement announcement at the Supreme Court before making these plans more public, anticipating lawsuits? - KWC
*8 million may lose OT pay**
Bush administration proposal would dramatically alter rules for paying overtime, study says.*
June 26, 2003: 3:14 PM EDT @ http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/26/news/economy/epi/index.htm
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - More than 8 million workers in the United States will be ineligible for overtime pay under a plan proposed recently by the Bush administration, a research group said Thursday*.
*
The *Economic Policy Institute (EPI**),* a liberal Washington think tank, examined a proposal by the Labor Department to change the criteria for paying overtime and found that it would cost 2.5 million salaried employees and 5.5 million hourly employees their right to overtime pay.
The proposed changes, which were first introduced in March, will be implemented by the Labor Department after a "public comment" period, which expires on Monday. The EPI questioned the appropriateness of the Labor Department's implementing such sweeping proposals without Congressional approval.
"There is no reason to believe...that Congress has authorized the Department of Labor to dramatically reduce coverage...taking overtime protection away from millions of workers," wrote the authors of the study, Ross Eisenbrey and Jared Bernstein. "Yet that is exactly what the Department of Labor has proposed."
Under current regulations, established by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, about 79 percent of all workers are guaranteed the right to overtime pay, or time-and-a-half for every hour worked above 40 hours in a week. Currently, there are three tests for whether or not an employee is ineligible for overtime -- the employee's level of pay, whether or not the employee is a salaried or hourly worker, and whether or not the employee performs certain job duties.
Under the current rules, any employee making more than $155 a week -- about $8,000 per year -- could be excluded from overtime, if they had a salary and a job description that fell into certain categories.
The good news is that the regulations would raise that cut-off amount to $425 a week -- about $22,100 per year -- actually /adding/ about 1.3 million lower-wage workers to the ranks of people eligible for overtime, according to the Labor Department. But the EPI study said that gain is more than erased by the rest of the administration's plan.
For one thing, many workers earning a salary of more than $65,000 a year will now be excluded from overtime -- at least 1.3 million workers, according to the EPI study. More critically, the job descriptions of millions of workers would be moved into certain "administrative," "professional" or "executive" categories that would exclude them from overtime.
For example, "learned professionals" are ineligible for overtime. Under the old rules, "learned professionals" were only those people who had scientific or specialized degrees. Now, work experience or technical training can be enough to make a worker ineligible for overtime. In another example, "executives" ineligible for overtime, according to the old rules, were people who hired and fired workers, set wages and assigned work. The new rules broaden the definition of "executives" to include any workers who occasionally supervise other workers, even if they spend most of their time doing manual labor.
According to the EPI study, which used Labor Department and General Accounting Office data about worker pay and qualifications, the total effect of the three changes is to exclude at least 8.025 million workers from overtime -- and probably more, the study said, since the EPI only looked at 78 of the 257 "white collar" occupations identified by the Labor Department.
The proposal could also cause workers to work longer hours, since the Labor Department doesn't put any limit on the number of hours per week an employee must work, the group said in a study published on its Web site. "Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said.
The Bush administration has said the new rules are clearer and will lower the chance of employee lawsuits. The EPI study said the proposal could have the opposite effect. "The proposed rule is rife with ambiguity and new terms...that will spawn new litigation," the study said.
The national labor organization AFL-CIO said the Labor Department complained that the Labor Department had stifled public debate about the proposed changes. For example, they said the Labor Department had canceled a union hearing on the issue, scheduled to take place on June 30 in a Labor Department auditorium. "The fact that Labor hasn't held any public hearings on their proposal to cut overtime pay, and that they have abruptly canceled the union movement's paid reservation to hold a hearing on the issue, is another sign of the administration's refusal to permit debate and dissent," AFL-CIO spokeswoman Kathy Roeder said. "It is a grave disservice to the millions of workers who stand to lose from the overtime proposal."
The White House could not immediately be reached for comment
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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