Biden administration seeks to expand overtime pay to millions of US workers

Millions of U.S. workers may now become eligible for overtime pay under an overhaul of wage rules announced by the Biden administration on Aug. 30. The rule, which would make workers earning up to $55,000 a year eligible for overtime, is intended to reverse four decades of reducing the number of workers qualified to earn overtime pay. As Capital & Main reported in a series of stories last year, overtime pay has steadily eroded so that the percentage of workers eligible for overtime is now a fraction of what it was in the 1970s.
  
Currently, workers who earn more than $35,568 annually are not eligible for overtime. An estimated 15% of full-time salaried workers qualified for overtime in 2022, down from more than 60% of full-time salaried workers in 1975. The new eligibility rule could make 3.6 million more U.S. workers eligible for overtime pay, according to the administration. Overtime is defined by the Fair Labor Standards Act as 1.5 times one’s hourly pay rate after working more than 40 hours per week.