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September 13, 2004
No more lawsuits, it's all fair pay
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Lisa-Jean Mugler Opinions Editor |
Did you know that our government is looking out for us? Truly!
As of Monday, August 23, those of us who make $23,660 a year ($455 a week) or less are now safe! No mean ol' corporation can make us work overtime yet refuse to pay us. Take that, Wal-Mart! Ha-hah, non-union businesses!
Although, if you are administrative anything, you won't need protecting because the new rules say so. Are you an executive? A professional? An "outside" sales employee? Maybe even … gasp, a "computer employee"? Well, all 107,000 of you who have now lost your overtime pay protection, can obviously take care of yourself!
In our country of 294,115,542 people, our kind and beneficent King George and his party, have seen fit to benefit 6.7 million of us (1.3 million "low-wage" earners)
who have been bullied by those awful, self-serving corporations.
Funny, though, the Washington Post said that there were 115 million workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), the one that was working fairly well, at least until now.
By my math, that leaves 108.3 million people - normal people, single mothers, single-paycheck families - who now stand in the crosshairs of those bully corporations like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Bank of America.
Until now, these corporations have been sued successfully by normal people when as employees they were forced to work unpaid overtime. Those lawsuits were won on the basis of that "outdated" law that Bush decided to "update."
I really like the part about how the old regulations were so "out of date and confusing" that they caused all those super expensive lawsuits.
It couldn't have been the corporations' refusal to pay overtime to the very people they took advantage of. Nah, those pesky lawsuits were because of the FLSA laws from so long ago, when no one spoke plain English! Thank God we have a president who looks out for the little guy!
I’m noticing that support for all these changes come from the exact industries that benefit financially from Bush being in office.
For now, police, firefighters and nurses are not “exempt" from overtime pay, but their bosses, the "administrators", the lieutenants, could very well lose that extra pay because of loopholes as districts and hospitals seek to "trim" excess "fat" from their budgets to enhance profits.
Our lowest-paid workers are now protected from being forced to work overtime without pay, and that is a good thing.
But the lack of support for the "average" worker is frightening. Aren't they the ones who are middle management, or service industry, with all the attendant stress? Aren't they the ones who sometimes "go postal"? So do you want YOUR pharmacist to be working overtime without compensation? How about your dental hygienist?
Although the law from 1938 is "updated", they must have accidentally forgotten to “update” minimum wage. Oh, wait! They did that in 1998. Everyone should be able to live comfortably, and even support a family, on $5.15 an hour!
So now with rules like these, our children can go to work at Wal-Mart as soon as they turn 8 (guaranteed overtime protection!), so that we can buy groceries. Aren’t you proud to live in the good old United States of (Corporate) America?
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