OVERTIME PAY Workers express concerns for rules
Some workers are unhappy that they are now eligible for overtime.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The complaints began even before University of Missouri administrators e-mailed more than 400 employees to confirm what might seem a harmless change -- soon, the memo said, they'd be eligible for overtime pay.
It was not what Mary Porter wanted to hear. It had taken Porter 35 years to climb the university's ladder, from the copy machine operator's job she started just out of high school, to a position with the salary, benefits and responsibility certifying her as a professional. Now the grandmother of three saw the university, armed with new government rules on overtime pay, pulling the ladder's top rungs out from under her.
"It just feels like, in a sense, I've had something taken away from me," said Porter, an administrative associate who half-jokes that she's "trained" the last four chairmen of the university's anthropology department. "I had that [salaried] status because I worked my way up. ... It made me feel personally like I had accomplished something."
The Bush administration's new rules on overtime pay have been at the center of a furious, and still unresolved, debate over charges they will cost millions of workers the right to overtime pay. But some employers are catching flak of a variety few expected -- not from workers angry about losing overtime pay, but from some irritated about a change that gives them the right to receive it.
For many, the change amounts to a difficult-to-define feeling that their work and status is cheapened.
"Not every company saw this coming, and I certainly don't think the regulators had a sense that this was going to happen," said Jonathan Sulds, an attorney with corporate law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & amp; Feld LLP in New York.
Some in favor
Employers, anxious to turn the tide on a swelling wave of expensive lawsuits by workers claiming they've been unfairly denied overtime pay, largely favored the administration's overhaul of wage laws. The changes, which took effect Aug. 23 despite vehement criticism by labor unions, are focused mainly on skilled and white-collar jobs.
Some of the changes are straightforward. Workers earning less than $23,660 a year must be paid for overtime under the new rules, almost triple the old salary requirement. Workers earning more than $100,000 and whose jobs regularly include at least one administrative or professional responsibility will now be excluded from overtime eligibility.
But the new rules, part of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, are complex and leave much to interpretation. Nobody really knows how many workers will be affected, or how they will be impacted.
Debate
The debate has included estimates that anywhere from 107,000 to as many as 6 million workers will lose overtime eligibility. Estimates of how many will gain eligibility vary from almost none to 1.3 million. It could be some time before the reality becomes clear.
Employers, though, say strong reactions from some workers whose jobs have been reclassified from salaried to hourly -- giving them access to overtime pay -- has already created awkward situations.
"I and other people feel like our career ladder has been cut off," said Danni Derryberry, an administrative associate in counseling services who's worked at the Missouri for 38 years.
Managers at fashion marketer Kenneth Cole Productions Inc. have run into similar objections from some workers at its New Jersey offices with jobs in white-collar fields like accounting and legal services. Many of those employees consider themselves professional, said Michael Colosi, the company's corporate vice president and general counsel.
But as managers informed some employees that their pay would be computed on an hourly basis, some took it as an indication that they were no longer on the management track.
"That really, when you're dealing with somebody who is college educated and works in an office capacity, sort of challenges their notion of the status of their position," he said.