Mr. President:
I realize that your presidency is fast coming to its end. I also realize that during your presidency, you've attempted to make things right for Americans. I haven't always agreed with some of the things you've proposed (I think Obamacare is radically overpriced, for example, and I don't feel that amnesty is the right answer for illegals), and I think other things have been deprioritized that should have been front and center (that we still have overreaching TSA, the tax code is still broken, and banks are still allowed to discriminate against people based on faulty credit agencies that are making billions in profit).
I do want to call to attention an issue that's always been there, and that's pay. Not hourly pay. Salaried pay. For you see, employers have long been abusing this in order to minimize how much they need to pay employees.
The law was apparently written during a time when the idea of a "professional" position really involved someone in management. Over the years companies have extended this with numerous sub-exemptions that pretty much label anyone not working data entry, customer service, mail room or retail, as an "exempt" employee. This lets them avoid paying overtime, but with no penalty applied against the company when they abuse the employee's time.
As companies downsize due to the Recession, the changes in minimum wage, the rise of offshoring, etc., many companies figured out that they could simply stack double the work on an employee, but were not required to pay them any additional money for time above and beyond 40 hours. Normally, this should work the other way: if an employee works at least an hour and gets their work done, that should be sufficient. It's not. Companies require employees to stay around for 40 hours minimum, even to the degree of requiring timesheets to back up that they put in a full 40 hours.
This goes against the very spirit of a "salaried" employee, which was intended to pay a person based on work being completed, not a duration of time being allotted.
But the complexity gets worse. An "Exempt" employee could be paid hourly (Computer professional exemption). The requirements for this are even less logical: all a company has to do is agree to an hourly rate of at least $27. If a person clocks one hour, they're paid $27. They get no overtime, so if a company abuses their hours, they get paid flat for the extra time investment above 40 hours, which doesn't go a long way towards properly compensating the employee for "going above and beyond" - the true spirit of overtime time-and-a-half pay.
If a company hires an employee that does not do any of the "primary duty" work for that company, BUT is instead "lended" to another company as a consultant, some companies are abusing the exemption by saying that the work done for the other company qualifies.
This is all to the detriment of the employee, benefit of the employer, and has cost people millions of dollars in lost overtime pay.
Something should be done about this to ensure that people who go above and beyond are compensated, regardless of status, work type, or job type, so long as they are not management employees. To me that's as simple as creating a single criteria for exemption: a person must have a direct report in order to be exempted from overtime pay OR your annual salary is at least 2x the median for the state, whichever happens to come first and must adjust with inflation.
This has four possible net effects.
One, companies will increase salaries so they don't need to pay overtime; a fixed annual investment in lieu of a variable hourly investment.
Two, a significant increase in the number of employees eligible for overtime, but a sharp decrease in the amount of overtime those employees are allowed (forced) to work.
Three, continuing re-evaluation of employee salaries to ensure they don't lose the exemption. If a state's median is $40k and an employee makes $85k, they're exempt that year, but if the median rises the following year to $60k, the employee must now make at least $120k (a substantial raise that most companies won't do), or be now eligible to receive overtime pay at time-and-a-half (which lets the company constrain overtime accordingly).
Four, companies will hire more employees to do work rather than force existing employees to do overtime and pay more than they would pay additional staff. This lightens workloads across the board - right now, employers are doing everything they can to minimize staff, which creates burden on existing employees who don't get fairly compensated for the extra work they're doing.
I am not sure if you're the right outlet to hear the plea, but I think the plea should be heard and considered. It's a problem. It's been a problem for far too long. The fix is terribly easy; get rid of all of the complex, confusing exemptions that benefit only employers. Put the power back in the hands of the employees by dumbing down the exemption: either they have at least one direct report (which they need to manage documentation for, of course), OR they make at least 2x the median, adjusted with inflation. Otherwise, no exemption for that year.
