Wages up as Americans are encouraged back to work and into the office – 3 takeaways from the latest jobs report

  After a lackluster jobs report in September 2021, the latest news on employment gives Americans plenty of cheer about ahead of the holiday season.

  In total, 531,000 jobs were added in October – outstripping the already optimistic predictions of economists. This caused the unemployment rate to fall 0.2 percentage points to 4.6%.

States are going around Trump to get more workers overtime pay

  Getting a promotion is usually a cause for celebration. But after Chip Ahlgren was made a general manager at a Jiffy Lube in Washington state, he moved from an hourly position to a salaried one and was no longer owed overtime pay when he put in more than 40 hours a week. Instead, Ahlgren could be asked to work as many hours as his boss demands for the same $52,000 a year.

  These days, he’s putting in around 60 hours a week, even though his contract says he’s supposed to work 50 hours and the payroll system only counts 40 hours a week for the purpose of accruing sick leave. His managers keep giving him more to do. “They just add and add and add,” he said. “There’s no way for us to get everything done.”

How long should the workday be?

  It has been eighty years since the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed by Congress and signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1938. The FLSA established a national minimum wage of 25¢ an hour, mandated time and a half for overtime in certain jobs, prohibited most child labor, and established a 44-hour workweek (lowered to 40 hours in 1940).

  Although the national minimum wage has steadily risen to $7.25 per hour (where it has stood since 2009), the workweek has never been lowered below 40 hours.

  Some people want that to change.

Jacob G. Hornberger: A basic principle about capital

  Imagine a farm in an impoverished country, a farm where the workers are using hoes to do their work in the fields. The farm produces 1000 bushels of wheat a year, which is sold for $10,000. The farmer’s income statement reads as follows:

Brendan Duke: How overtime reform will grow the economy from the middle out

  Our overtime system is broken. Just 18 percent of full-time workers have guaranteed overtime rights today. And unless the Department of Labor modernizes the overtime rules, 0 percent will have them by 2030 if current trends continue.

  Without guaranteed overtime rights, employers can easily misclassify workers who spend most of their time at the cash register or restocking shelves as overtime-exempt “executives” or “professionals” and avoid paying them overtime—1.5 times their hourly wage or the equivalent for salaried workers.

Ianta Summers: Working to stay poor

  I have a friend who works at Foot Locker—the successful international retail chain of more than 3,300 stores—who is struggling to make ends meet.

  He’s an assistant manager at a store in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He told me he earns $7.55 an hour for a 40-hour work week. In addition, he said he gets a twp percent commission on sales, discounts on in-store purchases, stock options, and health care. My friend does well, selling dozens of pairs of sneakers every pay period that cost as much as $250 each. But even if those benefits seem generous, when his check reaches his pocket, he doesn’t have enough money to support himself—or a family.

Adam Hersh: Most new jobs don’t pay a middle-class wage

  Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data about the October employment situation that show the surprising resilience of U.S. labor markets—even as extreme conservatives in Congress risked economic calamity by hijacking the political debate. The U.S. economy added 204,000 net new jobs in October, even with the loss of 12,000 federal workers from the public service. Although the government shutdown disrupted administration of these economic surveys, the data do not appear to be systematically affected, according to the BLS.