Learn More About the Working People Who Would Get a Raise Under an Overtime Rule Update
By AFL-CIO
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has produced detailed information about the 13.5 million salaried working people and their families who would benefit from the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed overtime eligibility rules.
These 13.5 million working people include those who would gain overtime eligibility, as well as others who are already overtime-eligible but would benefit from the clarity and certainty of a new rule that says all workers who earn less than $50,440 are eligible for overtime.
It is not exactly clear how many of these 13.5 million salaried workers would be newly eligible for overtime and how many of them are already overtime-eligible. The Labor Department estimates that 4.7 million workers would gain overtime eligibility as a result of the new rules, but this is a very conservative estimate based on obsolete data. We believe many millions more workers would gain overtime eligibility. According to EPI’s analysis, “most of these 13.5 million workers would newly gain overtime pay eligibility,” but EPI cautions that “there is inherent uncertainty about these estimates because no data are available documenting who is currently eligible for receiving overtime.”
The new EPI paper breaks down these 13.5 million workers by gender, race, age, educational attainment, state and major industry.
The 13.5 million workers include 6.9 million women; 2.1 million Latinos; 1.6 million blacks; 3.8 million workers ages 25 to 34; and 3.4 million workers with a high school education.
The industries with the largest numbers of affected workers are education and health services (2.7 million); wholesale and retail trade (1.8 million); professional and business services (1.7 million); financial activities (1.5 million); manufacturing (1.2 million); leisure and hospitality (968,000); public administration (843,000); and construction (797,000).
The states with the largest number of affected workers are, not surprisingly, the states with the largest workforces: Texas (1.3 million); California (1.2 million); Florida (1.1 million); and New York (1 million).
However, the states with the highest share of salaried workers who are affected by the new overtime threshold are not the usual suspects: Arkansas (35.5% of salaried workers affected); Hawaii (33.8%); North Carolina (32.1%); Oklahoma (31.9%); and Louisiana (31.7%).
Note that the Labor Department has a slightly larger estimate (14.7 million) of the number of workers who would benefit from the overtime proposal. These 14.7 million workers include the 4.7 million workers who the Labor Department estimates would be newly eligible for overtime, plus another 10 million workers (6.3 million white collar and 3.7 million blue collar) who are already overtime-eligible but would benefit from the clarity and certainty of the new overtime threshold of $50,440.