by Sandra Feldman

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 public employees. 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, which is exempt from FLSA overtime provisions. 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 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 law.

The FLSA was not designed just to make sure workers are fairly compensated; it also was intended to make employers pay a price so they would not work their employees inhumanly long hours.

While the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away the ability of state employees to sue their employers for monetary damages over violations of the FLSA, changes in overtime regulations will still affect public employee pay. The new overtime regulations also will become the standard for public employees, thereby making it more difficult for government employees at all levels to be paid for overtime work.

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”—burned out and stressed trying to juggle demanding work schedules and personal lives.

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 is 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 is the most anti-union and anti-worker in recent memory. Now is the time for all of us to fight back.