By Mike Hall & Kenneth Quinnell, AFL-CIO When you pay a financial adviser to help you invest your hard-earned retirement savings, you would assume that they would be required, by law, to have your best interests at heart. But because of loopholes in the rules, advisers can get away with not only putting their own […]
By Scott Klinger, Center for Effective Government Using Citizen Stories, the CFPB Identified Abuses, Won $5 Billion in Refunds for Consumers from Illegal Charges by Banks The nation’s newest government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is also one of the most responsive to the changing needs of Americans. Born in the aftermath of […]
By Heather Slavkin Corzo, AFL-CIO After continued pressure from you and tens of thousands of people across the country, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could finally be voting on implementing a rule requiring big companies to reveal their CEO-to-worker pay ratios as early as August. It’s about time. Five years ago this week, […]
By United Food and Commercial Workers At the UFCW, we believe that if you do the work, you deserve to be compensated. Unfortunately, not everyone has a voice on the job, and every day, millions of Americans work more than 40 hours per week with no pay. That’s because the salary threshold for overtime pay […]
By Abigail Bar-Lev, National Women’s Law Center If you were to break the law, you wouldn’t expect special treatment, right? If you were to violate someone else’s rights, you wouldn’t expect to get paid for it. And you certainly wouldn’t expect tax dollars to support your bad behavior. Yet that is exactly what’s happening […]
By Rebecca Thiess, Americans for Financial Reform Over the last few months, the CFPB announced enforcement actions against two companies that repeatedly targeted servicemembers with abusive products. The first company, Fort Knox National, and its subsidiary, Military Assistance Company, charged servicemembers recurring hidden fees by abusing a payment system many servicemembers use send money home […]
By Michell McIntyre, Center for Effective Government Last week, the White House announced a long-anticipated new rule that upgrades Americans’ access to overtime pay. Worker advocates, economists, and unions have been working with the Obama administration and U.S. Department of Labor for years to modernize the rules on overtime, and thanks to their efforts, millions […]
By Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers Businesses always find big bucks for the boss. He wants a raise; he gets it. No problem. For workers whose sweat of the brow produces profits, well, somehow there’s never a cent for them. In fact, last week when President Obama proposed making more workers eligible for overtime pay, fat […]
By Matt Breunig, Demos The Obama Administration passed new overtime rules that make 4.6 million more people eligible for overtime protections. In the resulting commentary, I’ve noticed some claiming it has certain downsides that I think are actually hugely important upsides. Here is Slate’s Jordan Weissman for instance: That said, there will be trade-offs. There […]
By Ross Eisenbrey, Economic Policy Institute In 2014, President Obama directed the Department of Labor to update the threshold under which all workers are eligible for overtime pay. Today, the Department of Labor announced that it will raise the overtime salary threshold from $23,660 to $50,440 by 2016. The threshold will also be indexed, guaranteeing […]
By Caroline Fredrickson, Economic Policy Institute A lot has changed since 1975. The Soviet Union collapsed, we fought (and are fighting still) several wars in the Middle East, same-sex marriage is now legal across the United States, we have our first African-American President, we have the internet. But what has changed only minimally is the […]
By Ross Eisenbrey and Will Kimball, Economic Policy Institute If salaried employees are paid less than the overtime salary threshold (currently $23,660 in annual salary), they are entitled to overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. If however, they make more than the salary threshold, they are entitled to overtime […]