(The hill) – President Biden extends overtime protections to workers earning less than the median individual salary and announces further action if re-elected.
The executive action announced Monday will extend protections to workers earning less than $43,888 a year, the White House said in a statement. Previous overtime protections only applied to employees earning less than $35,568 a year.
“This means higher wages and more family time for millions of Americans,” Biden said.
The president promised to expand protections even further next year if Democrats remain in the White House, increasing overtime pay for another three million workers with an increased threshold of $58,656 – an amount above the average individual salary of $47,960, according to census data.
The up-to-date overtime extensions, which take effect Monday, stem from a rule passed in April in a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The changes are the result of an updated Calculation of the Ministry of Labor.
The rules introduced by the Democrats are to be changed every three years starting in 2025, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said in a statement.
“This rule will give workers back the promise of being paid more if they work more than 40 hours a week,” Su said. In April, when the up-to-date overtime rule was finalized. “Too often, lower-paid workers do the same work as their hourly colleagues but spend more time away from their families without getting paid more. This is unacceptable. The Biden-Harris administration is keeping our promise to raise the bar for workers who help lay the foundation for our economic prosperity.”
After the pandemic, wages for low-income workers rose faster than the national average. This phenomenon is called “wage compression” and gave workers more freedom. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts first discovered it.
“Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations – particularly among young workers without a college degree (high school or less),” the Researchers found.
The rise in lower-income wages may have impacted the 2022 midterm elections, which many forecasters expected to see a “red wave” of huge wins for Republicans. Instead, Democrats retained the Senate while Republicans narrowly won the House.
While the economy was a top issue in 2022 as inflation rose to an annual raise of nearly 9 percent, experts pointed out that increased wages and better working conditions may have translated into votes for Democrats.
“[Many voters] “Most people were better off than they were two years ago, so the negative electoral impact was minimal,” Matt Darling, an employment policy fellow at the Niskanen Center think tank, told The Hill in 2022.
According to numerous media reports, the political announcement followed the president’s appearance in a debate on Thursday, which unsettled many Democrats and caused panic throughout the party.
Biden is making a name for himself as one of the most worker-friendly presidents in US history. Last year, he was the first to take part in an vigorous picket line for the United Auto Workers union during its strike at the three major US automakers.
While Biden supports the expiration of the Trump-era tax cuts, some of which expire at the end of next year, he has promised not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
