White House Raises Limit for Overtime Pay

The Bush administration, bowing to political pressure, has revised new regulations on overtime to keep the benefits for most workers earning up to $100,000 a year, congressional Republicans confirmed Monday.

“They have moved the threshold to allow more workers to qualify for overtime,” said Stuart Roy, spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Roy, who accused Democrats of “demagoguing” the issue, described the revisions as an administration effort to clarify what he termed the “ambiguity” of who would be affected by the changes in overtime regulations -- to “make it black-and-white,” he said.

An aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) also confirmed that the regulations had been revised.

Although the revisions appeared to allow more workers to continue to qualify for overtime pay, they failed to win over Democrats, who had attacked the regulations as unfairly denying overtime pay to millions of white-collar, nonunion workers.

On Monday night, although they had not seen the administration’s changes, two senators who have led the Democrats’ effort to block the regulations -- Tom Harkin of Iowa and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts -- denounced the reported revisions as inadequate.

“The Bush administration simply is not trustworthy on this issue, and I am beyond skeptical about these so-called revisions,” Harkin said in a statement. “This president has gone out of his way time and again to undercut working families’ right to overtime pay for overtime work.”

Kennedy, a close political ally of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, said in a statement that “no amount of White House rhetoric will stop employers from applying this shameful anti-worker rule just as Republicans planned it -- to boost business profits by employees to do the work.... Bush administration officials can apply whatever gloss they want, but the plain fact remains that their regulation robs workers of their hard-earned overtime pay, and that’s just wrong.”

A Labor Department spokesman would confirm only that Labor Secretary Elaine Chao would hold a news conference today to announce the overtime regulations, which are expected to take effect Wednesday with their publication in the Federal Register. The spokesman refused to confirm any details about revisions, or even whether any had been made.

Chao issued the regulations in March 2003, instantly drawing attacks from Democrats, organized labor and some Republicans. Last fall, House and Senate Republicans joined Democrats in support of measures to block the regulations, only to see their efforts stripped out of a giant spending bill at the White House’s insistence.

The Labor Department said the regulations, as initially proposed, would mean that 644,000 white-collar workers could lose overtime benefits and 1.3 million could gain them.

White House officials told Associated Press on Monday night that up to 107,000 workers could lose overtime protection under the revisions, but 6.7 million workers would be guaranteed overtime. Associated Press also reported that the revisions would guarantee that firefighters and police officers would be paid overtime.

Democrats expressed skepticism at those figures.

The regulations have become a potent campaign issue for Democrats, who have pointed to them as evidence of what they say is the administration’s insensitivity to the needs of American workers in tough economic times. They have sought to attach amendments blocking the regulations to various “must pass” bills this term.

Ross Eisenbrey, of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank, offered qualified praise -- and some criticism -- of the reported revisions.

Raising the salary threshold for workers defined as “highly compensated,” and therefore ineligible for overtime pay, from $65,000, as Chao originally proposed, to the reported $100,000 was “a highly positive change,” Eisenbrey said.

But even with the revisions, Eisenbrey said, “millions of workers are going to be affected by this rule” and lose overtime eligibility.

It was unclear whether the revisions would be supported by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, retailers and restaurant owners, who had supported the regulations that Chao initially proposed.

Allison Dobson, a spokeswoman for Harkin, said the senator would continue to propose amendments changing the regulations to any legislation Senate Republicans care about passing this term. Harkin already has proposed an amendment that would prevent the administration from taking away overtime protection from any worker currently receiving it, Dobson said.

Republicans pulled a proposed overhaul of the corporate tax laws earlier this month from Senate debate rather than allow a vote on the Harkin amendment. Harkin has said that if that legislation comes up again, he would offer his amendment on overtime again.

“We will offer it to every single piece of legislation that goes through the Senate, bar none,” Dobson said. She accused Republicans, in making the revisions to the regulations before publishing them in the Federal Register, of having “cherry-picked out some of their political problems.”

“As far as we’re concerned,” Dobson said, “this does nothing. A few people would gain overtime in the low-income end.”

The new regulations would revise overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, adopted in the 1930s to protect the right of millions of workers to earn time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours a week.

Chao and other administration officials have defended the proposed regulations as “long overdue” and meant only to modernize outdated rules that no longer apply to the U.S. work force. President Bush has threatened to veto any legislation that would block the regulations from becoming law.

As originally proposed, the regulations would guarantee overtime pay to workers who earn less than $22,100, an increase from the $8,060 threshold that had been in effect for years. The administration said that 1.3 million workers currently ineligible for overtime would become eligible under the $22,100 threshold. Associated Press reported Monday that the administration had upped that threshold again in the revisions to be announced today, ensuring that lower-wage workers earning less than $23,660 a year would be paid overtime.