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Weekly Address: President Obama – Rewarding Hard Work by Strengthening Overtime Pay Protections

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The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

 

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama highlighted the action he took this week to reward hard work by strengthening overtime pay protections. As part of this year of action, the President has ordered the Secretary of Labor to modernize our country’s overtime rules to ensure that millions of American workers are paid a fair wage for a hard day’s work.

While our economy is moving forward, the middle class and those fighting to get into it are still struggling and too many Americans are working harder than ever just to keep up, let alone get ahead. So, in consultation with workers and business, the Obama administration will update and simplify the rules to reward hard work and responsibility.

Transcript: Weekly Address: Rewarding Hard Work by Strengthening Overtime Pay Protections

Hi, everybody.  In this year of action, I’m doing everything I can, with or without Congress, to expand opportunity for more Americans.  This week, I ordered a review of our nation’s overtime rules, to give more Americans the chance to earn the overtime pay they’ve worked for.

Here’s why this matters.  Our businesses have created 8.7 million new jobs over the past four years.  But in many ways, the trends that have battered the middle class for decades have grown even starker.  While those at the top are doing better than ever, average wages have barely budged.  Too many Americans are working harder than ever just to keep up.

We’ve got to build an economy that works for everybody, not just a fortunate few.  We know from our history that our economy grows best from the middle out, when growth is more widely shared.  So we’ve got to restore opportunity for all – the idea that with hard work and responsibility, you can get ahead.

Now, for more than 75 years, the 40-hour workweek and the overtime protections that come with it have helped countless workers climb the ladder of success.  But today, an overtime exception originally meant for highly-paid employees now applies to workers who earn as little as $23,660 a year.  It doesn’t matter if you do mostly physical labor, or if you work 50, 60, even 70 hours a week.  Your employer may not have to pay you a single extra dime.    

In some cases, this rule makes it possible for workers earning a salary to actually be paid less than the minimum wage.  And it means that business owners who treat their employees fairly can be undercut by competitors who don’t.  That’s not right.  So we’re going to update those overtime rules to restore that basic principle that if you have to work more, you should be able to earn more.  And we’ll do it by consulting workers and businesses, and simplifying the system so it’s easier for everyone.

Americans have spent too long working more and getting less in return.  So wherever and whenever I can make sure that our economy rewards hard work and responsibility, that’s what I’m going to do.  Because what every American wants is a paycheck that lets them support their families, know a little economic security, and pass down some hope and optimism to their kids.  That’s something worth fighting for.  And I’ll keep fighting for it as long as I’m President.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

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Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 28 Comments

28 comments

  2. JanF

    Real estate agents and homeowners in flood prone areas:

    President Barack Obama is set to sign into law a bipartisan bill relieving homeowners living in flood-prone neighborhoods from big increases in their insurance bills.

    The legislation, which cleared Congress on Thursday, reverses much of a 2012 overhaul of the government’s much-criticized flood insurance program after angry homeowners facing sharp premium hikes protested.

    The Senate’s 72-22 vote sent the House-drafted measure to Obama. White House officials said he’ll sign it.

    Long-term unemployed unable to find jobs in the worse economic downturn in 70 years?

    Senate negotiators struck a bipartisan deal Thursday that would renew federal unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, allowing for retroactive payments to go to more than 2 million Americans whose benefits expired in late December.

    Its outcome in the House remains up in the air, however. Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who has opposed previous Senate plans as insufficient in providing offsetting cuts, did not offer a statement on the new proposal.

  3. Portlaw

    very busy so haven’t been around to see how you all are. I am obsessed about the missing airplane and Crimea and am going to check the news. As for the missing airplane, I identify with the passengers as well as their families. What a nightmare. Spring might be in the air but then again…. Talk later. Behave yourselves!

  4. princesspat

    Nate Silver on the Launch of ESPN’s New FiveThirtyEight, Burritos, and Being a Fox

    Can you explain the mythology behind the new fox logo?

    The fox logo comes from a quote which was originally attributable to an obscure Greek poet: “The hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many little things.” The idea being that we’re a lot of scrappy little nerds and we have different data-driven – I hate data-driven as a term – but data journalism takes on a lot of different forms for us. Often, yeah, it does mean numbers and statistics as applied to the news, but it also means data visualization, reporting on data that is both numerate and literate; down the road, it came mean investigative journalism. It can mean building models and forecasts and programs. At the same time, it’s still data journalism. It’s not enough just to be smart. There’s a particular series of methods and a way of looking at the world.

    Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically. We think about our philosophy for when we choose to run with a story or when we don’t. We talk about avoiding “smart takes,” quote-unquote. This is data journalism, capital-D. Within that, we take a foxlike approach to what data means. It’s not just numbers, but numbers are a big part of this. We think that’s a weakness of conventional journalism, that you have beautiful English language skills and fewer math skills, and we hope to rectify that balance a little bit.

    His  NYT site was mostly political so it’s going to be interesting to see what will develop with  more broadly focused data journalism. The new FiveThirtyEight launches on March 17th    http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

  6. JanF

    IAN HANEY LÓPEZ, Politico: Is Paul Ryan Racist?

    [In 2010, former RNC Chairman] Michael Steele similarly acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

    But what of Ryan’s insistence he did not consider race whatsoever, or his later explanation that he had been “inarticulate” in his comments? Perhaps Ryan genuinely did not recognize the racial narrative embedded in his remarks about an inner city culture that devalues work. But at best, this suggests that Ryan has uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones.

    Less charitably, in weighing Ryan’s protestations of innocence, we should be clear that denying racial intent is par for the course in dog whistling. The whole point of speaking in coded terms is to transmit racial messages that can be defended as not about race at all. Today’s broadly shared anti-racist ethos condemns naked appeals to racial solidarity; those politicians who nevertheless seek to trade on racial provocations must do so in ways that maintain plausible deniability. […]

    Dog whistling is not rooted in fiery hatred but rather in cool calculation-it’s the strategic, carefully considered decision to win votes by stirring racial fears in society. Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether-as a tactical matter-he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions.

    Apparently Paul Ryan will be meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus to try to convince them that he had no racist intent. He will have 40 years of history, and the successful use of this particular dog whistle in turning the South reliably Republican, to overcome.

  7. princesspat

    Paul Ryan’s Poverty Attacks Hurt Women The Most

    It is near impossible to untie the knots of political hypocrisy that have ensnared Paul Ryan. On the one hand, the former vice-presidential candidate is a staunch Catholic, which would seemingly align him with helping the poor rather than punishing them. Instead, he supports punitive welfare reforms and scolds urban black men as the cause of poverty, rather than the neoliberal policies he himself supports. At the same time, he is vehemently anti-abortion, yet seems to support family caps which could force women on welfare to seek an abortion.

    But if we begin to unravel the rhetoric, it becomes clear that Paul Ryan is no policy wonk, nor is he a revolutionary economic mind (he has already been criticized by economists for misleading and misrepresenting the facts on welfare in his latest proposal). In fact, he’s not even unique. He’s just another run-of-the-mill conservative who blames systemic poverty on those who are poor, who believes that women have no right to reproductive freedom or privacy, and who subscribes to the racist stereotype that black men are lazy.

    Paul Ryan seems hellbent on destroying the tattered remains of the American social safety net. In the process, it is people of color and low-income women who will suffer. Judging by his ideology and offensive rhetoric, that very well may be the point.

    How I wish more voters would read articles like this and understand the consequences of electing people like Ryan.

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