I Need Cash, Not Vacation.

I have been putting in a good amount of overtime lately, thus the dearth of actual opinion/inight articles here. Instead I have been posting qoutations, links and op-eds I have found around the papers. I promise I will get back to opinion in the near future.

Speaking of overtime, the new Bush overtime rules have garnered some attention (I say some b/c most major papers carried the story for a single day on the inner pages ... most local papers, at least the ones up here didnt even give it a single paragraph) as of late.

Some, like the AFL-CIO, have claimed the new rules will adversely affect 6 million workers. Others, like anti-worker law firms, have claimed it will actually expand the number of people eligible for overtime.

The reality is that it isn't the rules that matter, it is how employers use them. My prediction is that most employers will continue paying overtime as they did before for their current employees. But they will utilize the new rules for any new hires. That way the current workforce wont complain. And the new workers wont have say in it. Overall, I predict a net decline in the number of workers getting overtime.

Since when has an employer ever done something out of sympathy with workers? Every benefit we have has either been fought for, or is required by the labor market. What do I mean by required by the labor market? Employers dont offer great benefits out of the niceness of their soul-less hearts. They offer them becuase the labor market requires it. Unions fought for benefits. And to compete with comapnies that do offer benefits, the one's who didnt had to start offering them ... in order to attract employees.

The bigger, scarier overtime issue comes from Bush's new push to give employers the opportunity to substitute vacation hours for overtime pay. Mr. Bush couches this as giving employees a choice, but that is just another misleading statement from the Misleader in Chief.

The Flextime Plan requires companies to count overtime as any hours over 80 in a two week period. That means I could work 79 hours this week and 1 next week and get ZERO overtime credit for it. It also allows employers to substitute vacation hours for actual overtime pay. So if I worked 79 hours this week and 2 hours next week for a total of 81 hours, I would get a pathetic 1 hour vacation time credit.

When Bush says that employees have the choice he is dead wrong. Why? Under thc urrent rules the employer must pay me for overtime. Under the proposed Flextime Plan I accrue vacation hours and THEN I HAVE TO ASK THE BOSS FOR PERMISSION TO USE THEM! So the choice, friends, aint ours ... its our employers'!

To hell with that .... with wages falling, median income on the decline and proces going up I need CASH, not vacation!