Elaine Thompson/AP Photo
Washington state Labor and Industries Deputy Director Elizabeth Smith talks about the state’s new worker-friendly overtime rules during a news conference, December 11, 2019, in Tukwila, Washington.
What with all the things going on in Congress (here’s David Dayen’s account of all that went down yesterday), even the most groundbreaking new laws coming out of the statehouses aren’t likely to garner much attention. Which means it’s easy to miss news of the landmark progressive rule change, which will measurably help rebuild the middle class, that was promulgated today in Washington state.
Over the past half-century, the federal rules for eligibility for overtime pay have applied to fewer and fewer workers. In the 1970s, 62 percent of salaried full-time workers qualified for overtime pay if they had to work more than 40 hours a week. But then the age of Reagan, Volcker, and right-wing economics descended on the American workforce, and the annual pay level above which no one could receive overtime remained stuck in the low 20,000s. Today, a scant 7 percent of those workers are eligible for overtime pay. As the average workweek of full-time salaried employees comes to 49 hours, that means that millions of Americans do overtime work for no overtime pay.
In the last year of the Obama administration, the Department of Labor raised the eligibility threshold to close to $50,000, but the Trump DOL has scaled that back to just $35,000.
It’s no longer the age of Reagan in many progressive states, however, and today, at the direction of Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, Washington state’s Department of Labor announced that the overtime threshold in Washington would be raised over the next nine years to 2.5 times the state’s minimum wage—which comes out to $70,200 in today’s dollars. Nearly 400,000 Washington workers have been made eligible for overtime pay as a result of this rule change, which has long been lobbied for by organizations like Working Washington and a host of unions, as well as by Nick Hanauer, the Seattle investor who once again claims the title of America’s Most Enlightened Capitalist.
The new rule means that 45 percent of Washington’s salaried workforce will be eligible for overtime pay.
During the past decade, Washington and Seattle have often gone first with worker-friendly legislation (Seattle was the first city to raise its minimum wage to $15), often quickly followed by California and New York. Raising the overtime eligibility threshold should now be on the agenda in those two states—most especially in California, with its wall-to-wall liberal political culture and its yawning gap between personal income and housing costs. So, Gavin—how about it?
