For years, there wasn’t much benefit to being a salaried employee, aside from the obvious:  you get more control over your hours, maybe a different retirement system, some degree of prestige, the occasional free pizza, and so on.  However, one of the places where salaried employees didn’t see any extra benefits was overtime.  Most salaried employees didn’t get overtime, no matter how much extra time they worked.  Thankfully, that’s all changing.  The Labor Department says that salaried employees making less than $47,476 are now eligible for time-and-a-half overtime.

The good thing about that rule is that some 4.2 million employees who weren’t eligible for overtime are now eligible to get paid for staying past 40 hours.  Of course, that means that companies are going to take measures to keep these employees from getting overtime, either by moving them from salary to hourly status, hiring others to help with the work, cutting wages to make sure overtime balances out to the old pay level, and restricting overtime.  Employers are going to find a way around the law, just like they do with hourly overtime.

Still, if that means the poor manager at Wal-Mart gets to go home after working his 40 hours and someone else takes over, that’s still a pretty good benefit.

Tags: overtime, overtime rules, salaried employees eligible for overtime, overtime for salaried staff, labor department, us department of labor, overtime rules changed for salary staff, salary workers making less than 476 now get overtime, overtime threshold raised to 47476, overtime rules changed for white collar workers

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