WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) today led a letter to President Barack Obama in support of the Administration’s plan to expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay and finalize the rule without delay. Currently, the overtime salary threshold is $23,660 annually. Under the new rule, workers earning $50,440 annually would be eligible for overtime pay.

“Our economy has been built on the simple idea that if you work hard you can succeed. But for decades, employers have taken advantage of overtime rules to avoid paying workers the wages they have earned, making it tough to succeed even if you work hard,” said Brown. “The proposed overtime regulations would put a stop to that abuse to ensure that workers get extra pay for extra work. I urge the administration to finalize it as quickly as possible.”

The letter was sent by U.S. Sen. Brown along with nearly 150 Democrats in both the Senate and House, including U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA-03). According to the White House, nearly five million workers – including 160,000 in Ohio – will be newly eligible for overtime pay within the first year of implementation.

In January, Brown joined a group of 25 Senators in calling on the White House to increase the overtime pay threshold to include workers earning $1,090 per week and index the overtime threshold to inflation.

 Full text of the letter is below and available here.

July 20, 2015

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, D.C. 20006

Dear President Obama:

We write in strong support of the Department of Labor’s proposed action to strengthen overtime standards. We applaud your Administration’s efforts to help middle class families get the pay they have worked for by modernizing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations for overtime pay. Overtime protections are vital to ensure that workers earn a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

The Department of Labor’s (DOL) proposed regulation will raise the overtime salary threshold to $50,440 a year and automatically adjust the salary threshold going forward, so that salaried workers earning under $50,440 a year will earn time-and-a-half for hours worked over forty hours a week. Strengthening overtime protections by increasing the salary threshold restores the forty-hour work week—a cornerstone of middle-class life in America.  It gives these workers back time with their families and simultaneously encourages employers to provide additional hours of work to those part-time workers who want and need them to make ends meet.

Since the 1970s, average salaries for middle-class workers have dropped even while salaried workers have increased the number of hours they spend on the job.  Growing income inequality, stagnant wages, and rising family economic insecurity have all contributed to shrinking the once-robust American middle class. Today, too many Americans are working longer and harder with less to show for their efforts, partly because very few workers are eligible for overtime pay. The current salary threshold of $23,660 a year—which is less than the poverty threshold for a family of four–covers only eight percent of the workforce. This means that a majority of the workforce are left unprotected, some of whom are earning just over $455 a week.  These are not the highly-compensated executives and professionals to whom the exemption was intended to apply.  They are struggling middle-class workers who are too often overworked without any additional compensation for the extra hours they work. 

In 1975, almost two-thirds of American salaried workers earned a salary below the threshold and were automatically covered by the overtime protections guaranteed under the FLSA.  Raising the salary level as proposed by the Department and your Administration would increase the number of workers eligible for overtime pay by five million, covering 40 percent of American salaried workers. In addition, your proposal to index the threshold would ensure that the new threshold will continue to be meaningful for workers in the future. 

We urge you to maintain this robust proposed rule and move without delay to a final rule.  Thank you for your ongoing efforts to help working families succeed and strengthen the middle class.

Sincerely,

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