“Businesses are more than aware of their ability to take advantage of salaried employees below the overtime threshold and they do so — this is reprehensible and the state must put an end to it. ”
“My partner and I both work in customer service/retail.
I've been doing so since my first job (2008), and my partner has been a salaried manager for longer than he's lived in Washington (5+ years). It is completely unright that large, corporate business can essentially access unpaid labor by forcing their employees to work excessive hours without receiving additional pay for their work.
Every holiday season (the biggest time of the year for loved ones to be near, and coincidentally for corporations to reap a profit), I watch as my partner is expected to work up to 90 hours a week, getting paid only cents on the hour after he hits overtime. For every hour my partner works over 40, his hourly take home pay drops.
He is punished for putting in the extra effort he doesn't have the option to not put in, while the business which employs him makes more profit than ever (and not just due to the practically free labor they squeeze out of managers). Businesses are more than aware of their ability to take advantage of salaried employees below the overtime threshold and they do so — this is reprehensible and the state must put an end to it.
By increasing the overtime threshold, employers would be forced to treat their employees fairly in terms of work output vs pay by preventing them from taking advantage of being able to pay $0 per person hour. Employers should either have to pay their employees a fair living wage in exchange for the option to expect that employee to output as much work as two employees, or give more hours to current employees or hire additional employees.
This simple and fair act of requiring the large, greedy corporations to actually pay people accordingly for their time would help close the widening income gap, provide families with more time together, and abate American workers' growing work-induced anxieties. As long as a business is profitable, it's the people who actually do the work for that business that should receive the fruits of their labor and employees don't tend to work overtime in unprofitable businesses.”
— Alec, retail manager