After decades of decline in overtime pay, the Biden administration is considering action to sharply expand access in a time of high inflation. This is the second article of a four-part series examining the 40-year effort by big business and elected officials to deny Americans extra pay for extra work.
An impeached Republican president gives way to a labor-friendly Democrat with an ambitious agenda to expand workers’ rights from the White House. The Democrat wants to extend overtime wages to additional workers, but beset by rising gas prices and high inflation, the Oval Office comes under intense pressure from corporate lobbyists and fiscal conservatives in his own party. Fearful of the cost to companies and the risk of harming the economy, they want the president to slow down and shrink his vision of expanding overtime.
President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to expand overtime eligibility in the 1970s are notable today as Joe Biden’s administration seeks to boost workers’ buying power in the face of inflation driven up partly by pandemic economic stimulus, geopolitical instability and shocks to energy markets. Then, as now, the Labor Department recognized that providing working-class Americans time-and-a-half pay when they put in more than 40 hours a week would help them to cover soaring energy costs and cope with higher grocery bills.
Under Carter, overtime was limited to workers earning less than $8,060 per year — or a maximum of about $4 per hour. The Labor Department...
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