News Flash: Nobody Loses Their Overtime!
WASHINGTON — Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist today celebrated the anniversary of the updating and strengthening of workplace overtime rules by Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. At the same time, he called upon organized labor bosses and their “useful idiots” in academia and the liberal media to recant their bogus claims that millions of workers would lose their overtime as a result of the rules change.
The new overtime regulations went into effect on August 23rd of last year. To date, no one has reported losing overtime coverage, and it has been strengthened for moderate-income workers and first responders. Employers have more confidence in making evaluations about who is eligible for overtime, and trial lawyers have lost a tempting area of litigious gamesmanship.
“When the old rules were put in place, workers making more than about $8000 per year had their overtime in danger,” continued Norquist. “Now, that level of protection is tripled to almost $24000 and first responders are protected. Best of all, trial lawyers no longer have ambiguous rules as an excuse to go to court.”
Various reports by labor-subsidized academics and the slavish liberal media claimed that, “6 million workers were in danger of losing their overtime coverage as a result of the new rules” (CBS News, 08/23/2004)—a labor union-concocted figure that has literally been pulled out of the air. Now, after an entire year of the new rules being in place, no one has come forward who has lost overtime coverage.
“CBS News, the New York Times, and ‘academics’ should be ashamed of themselves,” said Norquist. “Only apparatchiks on Big Labor’s payroll could possibly see the common-sense updating of a sixty year-old rule as somehow dangerous to workers.”