Let’s say you just realized that you’ll need to leave work an hour early on Friday to have time to get to your son’s school play.
No worries, your boss is reasonable, so you approach him with a plan: You’ll make up the hour by staying later than usual on the first of the month, the next day you have a free evening.
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“Sure,” he says. And everyone lives happily ever after.
But wait, the federal government is on the line. Some busybody from the Department of Labor is telling you that you and your boss aren’t allowed to come to this agreement.
From the beginning of December, the mutually-agreed swap with your boss probably won’t be legal if you make less than $47,476 a year. It’s not your boss’s fault, it’s President Obama’s.
The fact that this was a voluntary and agreed-upon flex-time arrangement won’t protect your employer from legal liability. So he won’t risk agreeing to it. Under the Labor Department’s new overtime rule, your employer would have to pay you overtime for the extra hour the following week, even though he’s doing you a favor by being flexible.
So much for progressivism. Obama yearns for the rigidities of yesteryear and can’t see that you’re not being exploited when you work 39 hours this week and 41 hours next week at the same rate of pay and get the same pay for each. Out goes the flexible schedule that you and your employer use to mutual advantage. The federal government has just un-solved a problem you didn’t realize you had. Out also goes your opportunity to telecommute, since now your boss (or some other employee) will have to keep a close eye on your hours, probably spending a lot of time and money that he would rather spend on actual work.
For one subset of white-collar workers with which we are familiar — young professionals in low-paying journalism jobs — there could be more dramatic consequences. That self-starting reporter at a small-town paper who goes the extra mile because she wants to distinguish herself and move up? The editor might have to start throwing her out of the office at 5 p.m. And if she posts short items from home after hours (journalists never do such things, do they?) it could be cited as evidence later in a labor complaint.
Washington has for decades found it hard to stay out of other people’s business. But under Obama, the interfering itch has become incessant, and he has scratched it again and again. It should not be for Washington to micromanage weekly work schedules. But as Obama gets nearer to his departure from office, he seems to think he knows better about pretty much everything.
The overtime rule is par for the course for those too-frequent occasions on which government applies a one-size-fits-all solution in pursuit of an ideological goal. In the age of Uber and the sharing economy, the president and his liberal legions want to march us back to the labor market of the 1950s.
