President Obama has another crackdown in store for employers. His Labor Department will soon propose new rules tightening the definition of “manager” in the workplace, possibly even doubling the salary threshold for this distinction to $46,000. This would mean that more managerial employees could claim overtime pay under a 1938 federal law. The chief effect would be for employers to closely monitor and possibly reduce allowable overtime hours across the board.
It is absurd to force millions of white-collar workers back into a largely obsolete compensation regime developed for factory workers during the Great Depression. This act evinces an assumption on Obama’s part that the economic pie is no longer growing for America’s workers and nothing can change that — hence his Labor Department’s constant attempts to cut the pie differently by tweaking rigid and ancient federal rules.
Markets can work for workers, and they have done so in the not-too-distant past. But given the state of the labor market during the past six years, and the Obama administration’s unwillingness to accept any responsibility for the prolonged pain, the federal government has apparently accepted its role as manager of America’s economic decline. If the labor market were a patient, this would be hospice care.
The labor force has declined to a historic low under Obama — not all his fault, certainly, except that it remains there six years into his presidency. Where one might expect a vigorous bounce back from the recent swoon, job creation remains excruciatingly slow except in a handful of states. Outside of Texas, there are fewer jobs in America today than there were in 2007, despite an increase in the number of able-bodied adults. Wages are down and remain stagnant, meaning the jobs that exist today pay less than the ones that were there before.
In this environment, Obama has turned to placing greater government-imposed burdens upon business to rectify what he perceives as inequities in the system. In time of drought, he squeezes the stones for water.
Obama’s top-income tax increase already nips at the profit margins of small businesses, and thus at their ability to grow. With his proposed increase in the minimum wage, Obama wants to force employers with small profit margins to overpay for unskilled work. His healthcare law will soon force employers to double as insurance providers, within very specific and very expensive parameters. His crackdown on internships, his appointees’ unprecedented changes to union election rules and his own illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board all represent direct or indirect efforts to squeeze businesses harder and produce the miracle that his stimulus package never could.
This new rule is another step in that direction. It will force employers to adopt rigid systems of monitoring employee work hours that are an anachronism for most of today’s employed. Workers who have leeway to make informal flexible arrangements — especially working moms who might want to work a few extra hours now and take them off next week — will no longer have that luxury. They will now work under an obsolete and rigid federal timekeeping system.
Why? Because if you’re Obama’s Labor Department, after six years you believe this is the best America can do.
