By the time you read this column, the Bush administration will have taken away the right to overtime pay for 8 million workers, including many in healthcare. By the end of March, the U.S. Department of Labor will have forced changes in the rules governing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that will greatly reduce the number of people eligible for overtime pay.

First, the definition of "professional" will be expanded so that more employees fall within that category. In a particularly obnoxious wrinkle, employers now will be able to say that the training veterans receive as part of their military service should be considered the equivalent of a college degree, making those veterans automatically ineligible for overtime pay.

But the most important change is that workers who are "guaranteed" wages of $65,000 will no longer be eligible for overtime pay. For the first time in the history of the FLSA, there will be a cutoff point--an annual wage above which employers can require their employees to work an unlimited number of hours. It's obvious that once a precedent like this is established, it will be easy for subsequent administrations to keep lowering the number so that in a few years anyone making more than $50,000 a year is ineligible, then $40,000,  and so on.

The Bush administration must be counting on the idea that there will be those who think $65,000 a year is a sufficiently good enough income that employees shouldn't expect additional pay for working overtime. If so, they misunderstand the purpose of the act. The FLSA wasn't designed just to make sure workers are fairly compensated; it also was intended to make employers pay a price so that they wouldn't work their employees inhumanly long hours. U.S. employees already work longer hours than their counterparts in every other industrialized country.

We pay an extraordinary price for being what author Juliet Schor calls "the overworked American." Burnout, stress and long hours are among the primary contributors to shortages in nursing and other healthcare fields. There is evidence that long hours decrease quality, increase mistakes and lead to more accidents. Medical residents cite fatigue as a cause for serious mistakes in four out of 10 cases, and two recent studies link infection outbreaks at hospitals to overtime work. And let's not even talk about the effect on our mental health, our families and our personal lives. Instead of trying to lengthen our workweeks, we should be following the lead of European countries and fighting for more humane, family-friendly working hours.

Make no mistake; this assault on overtime pay is not a small regulatory change designed to make the law easier to understand, as the administration claims. It's part of a concerted effort to destroy employee protections that the labor movement worked for decades to achieve. At the same time the Bush administration was announcing that some lower-paid workers would be eligible for overtime pay for the first time, it put out a publication advising employers how to restructure their compensation to avoid paying overtime to those very same workers. This administration has become the most anti-union and anti-worker in recent memory. Our paychecks, our health, our safety on the job and the quality of our services are being threatened. Now is the time for all of us to fight back.